It’s been a year or so since we wrote about our favorite ideas for celebrating a long distance love affair from afar. If not in the romantic sense, I remain a person who looks back, yearning over the distances I’ve travelled, wishing I were closer to the people I’ve left, those who have left me behind somewhere, or who have somehow simply gotten farther away.
No, there is nothing that can replace the serendipitous joy close physical proximity affords. Scrolling through my Instagram feed has its own benefits, I’m sure, but it does not result in the kind of joyous accidental closeness that shared sidewalks and streets and grocery stores do. It is a poor proxy for friendship maintenance. But what else is to be done?
We have a list of suggestions that needs only minor modifications to apply to any non-romantic long distance relationship, but we know there simply is such a thing as a non-communication rut, from which we occasionally struggle (in what feels like total, endless vain) to free ourselves. There simply isn’t enough time or heart left in us at the end of the day to do everything we want to do: we have too much to tell, to hear, to ask about. It snowballs. We talk to someone in our heads so much we forget this is selfish and does not really count towards friendship. We know there are a million excuses to be made as we have in fact recently been making them to ourselves. We also know that the best start is just to sit down wherever we are, and start writing a letter.