walking tightropes

“It’s all about balance”, I quip sagaciously, one hand gesturing in the air, the other holding my half-consumed blue-paper-wrapped McDonald’s Fillet o’ Fish.

Sarah eyes me and eats a French fry.

“Y’know. Balance...I mean, you can swing to either of two extremes. You can get super-depressed and languish over absent love and just give up on life here and mope around...”

Sarah chokes at the thought of me downing tubs of ice cream, bars of chocolate and assorted sugar-laden comfort food every day.

“...Or. Or you can go the other way and just get caught up with the immediate surroundings and decide you don’t really need that kind of relationship anymore. You can live without it. So...for a long-distance relationship to work out, you need to find the balance between those extremes.”

"Mm-hmm," says she. Not like all this really applies to her. I'm talking to myself, really.

-----

“Balance. You need balance”.

Another day, another friend, another restaurant. My bowl of iced sago and honeydew melts slowly into a green-tinged puddle.

“I guess you need to work out the balance between different aspects of your relationship – emotional, physical, spiritual...can’t let any one dominate, or any one be neglected. Like, I mean, some degree of physical interaction isn’t a bad thing – it’s good, even, but it can’t be the only thing.”

I sound so wise, so knowing, so...

Ish. I hope I remember all the stuff I’m babbling about, I scoff in half-sarcasm to myself.

-----

So. What is there to say, really? It’s been a fortnight and a bit. Half a month already, since you took flight. I’ve somehow found ample time to be wistful, even though I don’t really have the time to spare. I wouldn’t say I’m balanced – perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I’m trying to embrace both extremes; be obsessed with a love halfway round the globe while concentrating fully on the necessities of life here. Needless to say, it leads to exhaustion, somewhat. Flurries of extravagantly long emails, hours spent on Skype, aching ears resulting from ill-fitting earphones, scrawled smudgy postcards, all intermingled with the other necessary things like driving exams, never-ending college applications, packing luggage, farewell dinners.

Emotional tightropes? So we inch along in a delicate balancing act, seeking the perfect tension between both ends that will enable us to stay high in the air without falling.

So we're not quite there yet, but hey.

No one ever said you couldn't enjoy being dizzily in love.

:)