8/31/2023

Long Distance Lovers

Life is incredibly adept at keeping me and any kind of regular writing practice at an almost romantic distance. We are not sweaty and smiling in the same bed night after night. Writing is busy. She wanders the dark spots at the edges of my eyes and won’t talk to me with any consistent frequency. This would be agony, this distance, but for a small needful fact:

I like it. 

I have always been drawn to the beauty of the distant love. Letters, long looks out of windows, giggling over the phone cocooned in the curled wires of nostalgic land lines. I am happy to pine for my poems, to hope with clasped hands for my next paragraph. I am a trans lesbian who spends a significant amount of time online, my heart is used to this digital punishment of Tantalus, reaching out for things beyond my hands. There are women across state lines who keep my sweet nothings tucked in their cheeks like shrinking hard candies.

I am used to reaching out, without reaching.

I have learned to enjoy the ache in my arms, as well as my heart. 

The writing will come, a migratory bird, a husband at war. If I hold my breath by the seaside of my mind, I will see it crowd the horizon soon enough. I’ve learned by now not to rush it. 
One benefit of this new iteration of my creative journey is that I’m writing with a different fuel than I used to. I’m not competing in slams or chasing publication. I am writing for the sheer clean joy of creating things. I occasionally submit when imposter syndrome sinks its greedy, green teeth into my neck, but that is a rare agony these days, thankfully.

I can be patient for writing’s return, because I do not need it. I am able to entertain its return at all for that same reason. I still remember the sweaty, red excavations of trying to write my truths and traumas at a breakneck pace just to have something new next week. I’m comfortable now. I will be writing when I have time and space. 

I have time and space enough now. I have a hunger now.

Writing will return, and we’ll feast together.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B