Five Thousand Miles Away

You came into my life as a name on a screen.

Just a follow request.
A small thing.
A tap of my finger.

I accepted it the way I accept so many things:
without thinking,
without knowing I was opening a door.

I don’t usually talk to people this way.

But I talked to you.

And then we were on the phone,
and the night began to loosen its grip on time.

We talked about our lives.
Then more.
Then things I hadn’t planned to say.

The hours disappeared around us
like water finding a crack in stone.

I didn’t want to look at the clock.
I didn’t want the call to become a call that had ended.

I wanted to stay there,
inside the sound of you.

You felt familiar before I knew you.
Not familiar like someone I had met before.
Familiar like a song I didn’t know I remembered
until the first note found me.

Since then,
you have been finding your way into my days.

A thought I want to tell you.
A moment I want to share.
Your name appearing on my screen
and something in me turning towards it.

I catch myself carrying little things for you.

A story.
A joke.
A question that can wait until we talk.

My day keeps handing me pieces of itself,
and I keep thinking:
I want him to know this.

I don’t know when that started.

I only know that now,
when something makes me smile,
part of me wonders if it would make you smile too.

You went on a trip,
and somehow you took me with you.

Not in your suitcase.
Not beside you on the road.

You took me in your voice.
In the time you made.
In the space you found for me
while your own life was happening somewhere else.

You let me be part of the experience.

I could not see the world through your eyes.
I could not stand where you stood
or feel the air around you.

But you made a place for me inside the day.

That mattered.

You could have gone away
and let the distance become silence.

Instead, you kept reaching for me.

I was here.
You were there.
And somehow I was still included.

There is something tender about that:
being remembered while someone is elsewhere.

The world moving around you.
Your plans carrying you forward.
And somewhere in all of it,
you making time to talk to me.

You are busy.

I know your days are full.
I know the hours already belong to other things.

Still, you make room for me.

You take time from the middle of your life
and give it to our conversations.

I notice.

Maybe you don’t think of it as anything special.
Maybe it is just a call,
just a little while,
just you and me talking.

But I notice the way it feels
to be welcomed into a busy day.

I notice how the hours soften
when I hear your voice.

And I notice what happens to me.

The butterflies.

Those small, impossible things
turning over beneath my ribs
whenever we talk
or whenever I think about you.

My body has started recognising you
before my mind can catch up.

Your name,
and there they are.

Your voice,
and there they go again.

I can be sitting perfectly still
when the warmth begins.

It rises through me quietly,
then all at once.

I feel it in my face.
In my chest.
In the sudden awareness of my own skin.

Thinking about you makes me hot.

There.
I said it.

It is strange how someone so far away
can make the room feel smaller,
can make my thoughts lose their place,
can make my body seem to lean towards a voice
it cannot touch.

You are five thousand miles away.

Five thousand miles
between the sound of your voice
and the place where I am sitting.

Five thousand miles
between wanting to reach for you
and having only the screen.

It is a big distance.

I won’t pretend it is nothing.

But sometimes,
when we are talking,
the miles feel like a held breath.

They are still there.
They do not disappear.

They just have to make room for your voice.

You speak,
and I listen from here.

I answer,
and you listen from there.

A little bridge appears between us,
made out of words,
out of time,
out of two people turning towards each other.

It is not enough to touch.

It is enough to make me hope.

And then there are the things you say about me.

The compliments that arrive every now and then,
so casually I almost don’t know what to do with them.

You say something kind.

I feel my face warm.
I look away from my phone.
I smile when no one is there to see.

Then later,
I remember.

Your words stay longer than the moment they came from.

They follow me into the rest of my day
like little lights I forgot I was carrying.

I wonder what you notice when you look at me.

I wonder if you know
how much a few kind words can change the air around me.

You make me feel seen.

Not in some enormous, impossible way.

In a small way.
A human way.

The way someone sees you
and decides to say something gentle.

I like that.

I like you.

I like hearing you talk about your life.
I like telling you about mine.
I like how easily one thing becomes another
when we are on the phone.

I like that you make me laugh.
I like that I want to tell you things.
I like that even after we stop talking,
some part of me stays with the conversation.

I like the excitement.

I like the way my heart seems to arrive early
whenever I think we might speak.

I like how new this is,
how bright,
how impossible to ignore.

I don’t know what to call it yet.

I only know what it feels like.

It feels like finding a light on
in a place I didn’t know I was looking for.

It feels like a door opening
when I thought I was only passing by.

It feels like wanting to know someone
one story at a time.

You and I are still new.

There is so much I don’t know about you.
So much we haven’t said.
So much that only time can tell us.

But I know this:

I want to keep talking to you.

I want to see what happens
when our conversations keep becoming part of our days.

I want to find out what the miles ask of us,
and whether we can answer them together.

We are planning to make this work.

I love that we are willing to try.

Five thousand miles is a lot.
I know it.

But there is something between us
that makes me want to look across them
instead of away.

I don’t know what the future will hold.

I know what I feel now.

I feel hopeful.
I feel excited.
I feel the butterflies when you speak.

I feel warmth when I think of you.

I feel the small ache of wanting to be closer
and the happiness of knowing you are there,
even from so far away.

Maybe this is what a beginning is:

not a promise,
not an answer,
but a light in the distance
that makes you want to keep walking.

You arrived by chance.

A name.
A request.
A conversation I did not know I needed.

And now you are here,
in the middle of my thoughts,
in the things I save to tell you,
in the warmth that rises when you say something kind.

You are there,
five thousand miles away.

I am here,
holding the sound of you
like a small flame against the dark.

It is early.

I know.

But it feels beautiful to be here,
at the beginning,
with my heart awake
and all this distance between us
already learning how to carry your voice.