Distance sucks

(First published 31/08/2012)

It’s a Small World... Not.

They keep telling us the world's getting smaller. Faster flights. Clearer calls. Better cameras that capture pores and pauses and the exact shade of tired in someone’s eyes. We FaceTime across oceans as if distance were just a bad habit we’re finally breaking.

And as usual, I am looking to the scientific community for a miraculous, cutting edge innovation, a way to get from point A to point B quicker and easier because I like my contact 1-on-1, face-2-face... and I am quite partial to instant gratification!

Likely, maybe. Logical, very possibly. Definitely useful… to everyone, including moi.

Meanwhile, I’m still trying to figure out how to get from missing you to being in the same room without breaking the bank, or my back stuck in Economy.

It’s funny, really. We can engineer a ride to the moon, but we can’t shorten the space between two people who know each other’s whole histories.

Which is why I vote we skip the moon and mars and focus our collective genius on teleportation, the device we were promised somewhere between childhood cartoons and badly dubbed sci-fi reruns. The one that would finally make a mockery of distance.

Imagine that.

Missing your sister in Saudi? Boom. You’re there. No airport tears. No time-zone math. Just the smell of her kitchen and the comfort of familiarity arriving at the same time.

A quick booty call to that hottie you’ve been face timing for months? Full throttle. All systems go. No buffering. No awkward “can you hear me?” Just chemistry, uninterrupted.

The possibilities are endless. Distance would lose its power. Geography would become obsolete.

Because for all the talk of global connection, the truth is simpler and sadder: the world isn’t small when the people you love are far away. It stretches. It expands. It becomes unwieldy and heavy and full of hours you didn’t ask for.

People are always moving now, toward new opportunity, away from danger, chasing something that feels like progress. And in every movement, someone stays. Someone watches departures turn into routines. Someone becomes very good at waving and letting go.

In this scenario, someone is always left behind. Hopefully it’s not you, but statistically, eventually, it is.

We try to laugh about it. We make jokes. We say things like, at least we have technology. As if a glowing rectangle could fully replace the weight of a person, the silence you share without filling it, the way a room changes when a particular person enters it... or the softest space that holds your heart and your secrets...

We pretend connection is the same as closeness because it hurts less than admitting it isn’t.

So we lean on music. Because music cheats distance better than science ever has.

I travel ’round the world and even sail the seven seas…
Across universes. Other galaxies. Just tell me where to go.

For three and a half minutes, a song does what no invention can. It collapses space. It pulls memory forward. It lets you arrive somewhere without moving your body at all. You are suddenly in a car, on her balcony under the stars, in a version of yourself that didn’t yet know how far life would scatter the people you loved.

And when the song ends, you feel it, that soft drop, the reminder that the world snaps back into its present reality faster then he says ,"Hey..."

We will probably get to the moon again before we get teleportation. We’ll build elevators into the sky while perfecting the art of missing each other from increasingly impressive distances.

And until then, we’ll keep pretending the world is small.
We’ll keep joking.
We’ll keep singing along.

Because if all else fails, we will always have that one song to take us there, even if, when the music fades, and we’re still exactly where we started, at a painful distance from those we love.