No one tells you that one day the people you love most won’t all live in the same place anymore.
The summer going into my junior year of high school, I stared out the trunk window of my mom’s Tahoe and watched as my friends stood in our driveway waving goodbye. It felt like a scene that was ripped out of a movie, only it wasn’t a scene—it was my real life. I was leaving behind family, friends, neighbors and the town I’d known for sixteen years.
That was the last time everyone I loved lived within a twenty minute drive.
Shortly before I headed off to college, my parents separated, which meant even more distance between the people I loved. I moved into my dorm and the following day my dad got his own apartment. Ever since then, pieces of my heart became scattered up and down the East coast. Now, the closest family member to me is my sister who’s still a three-and-a-half-hour drive (on a good day) away.
Long distance isn’t just hard for romantic relationships. It’s hard for families, for friendships, for the people who knew you before you knew who you were going to become.
Whether you like it or not, everyone eventually becomes a number on your list of priorities. Who was the last person I visited? When was the last time I saw them? Should I visit my mom and then my dad, or my dad and then my mom? How do I tell someone I can’t make it to their baby shower? The guilt is all-consuming. The FOMO never ends. No matter how much I try to show up, to be there for every little thing, it’s impossible.
The truth is, growing up means your life expands in ways geography can’t keep up with. The people you love are spread out across cities and states and time zones. The group chats stay active, but the couches and tables you used to sit together on or at are hundreds of miles apart. And suddenly, love looks different than it used to. Now it looks like flights you book months in advance, FaceTime calls while someone cooks dinner, saving Instagram posts of restaurants you want to try the next time you’re in their city, squeezing a whole friendship into a short 48-hour visit.
You spend years wishing everyone could just live in the same place again, but the older I get the more I realize that’s not the point. The point is that the love survived the distance.
Maybe the grief of growing up is geographic.
Because one day you wake up and realize the people who raised you, the friends who made you, and the life you built for yourself can’t all exist in the same place. So you learn to live between places. Between airports and long drives, between holidays and long weekends, between “I wish you lived closer” and “I’m so proud of the life you built there.” And if you’re lucky the distance won’t make the love smaller, it’ll just teach you how far it can stretch.
PS: My new novel, How to Find Love in the Cereal Aisle, releases on August 4th and is available to pre-order here. I appreciate your time and support more than you know! ILYSM <3
This showed up on my insta time line and I just get so emotional to think about how it came to me at the righest timing possible. I'm also living in a town which's a four hour drive from my family (which's not thaaaat much, but sometimes seems very difficult to bear the feeling of missing them). As a brazilian portuguese speaker, I would absolutely love reccomending you searching for the word "Saudade", that cannot be translated into english. Also, if you'd like to step deeper in how the artists here talk about the distance and the missing, listen to Rubel's "Partilhar", a beautiful song that's been here with me through all the procces of bearing the distance, learning different forms of love and giving other meanings to the word "home".
<3
well now i’m sobbing at 6am. rude. (so good😭)