space

1.

I felt like such a tourist in SoCal. My home of eight years no longer felt like home, and I viewed the familiar surroundings with foreign eyes. The lack of space astounded me. The freeways were always clogged, and even at two in the morning, a steady stream of cars hurried toward their respective destinations. Buildings hugged each other, filling crevices and replacing outdoor space with indoor space. I must have been accustomed to seeing all of this at one point, but these memories had long been filtered out and replaced by my college experience in St. Louis.

2.

I used to imagine that I would settle down in southern California to work and start a family. I remember loving Irvine when I visited in high school. I loved the perfect year-round seventy-degree weather, the proximity to the beach, Disneyland, and shopping, and the palm trees lining the wide, clean streets. And now, going back, all I could see were the big houses and nice cars and perfectly manicured lawns, an accumulation of wealth that was disconcerting, almost indecent. So much stuff yet so much space, spiritual emptiness in the midst of material abundance. I didn't realize how much had changed in the way I viewed the world over the last two years.

3.

I used to refuse to believe that proximity could define a friendship. Three years into college though, I reluctantly accepted that your immediate surroundings dictate most areas of your life. Some relationships can't survive without the nourishment of frequent interaction, and the physical space between two people becomes emotional distance. It's like Coulomb's law: the strength of the interaction varies inversely with the square of the distance between two particles. Sorry, random spurt of nerdiness.

It sucks when the two feet of space between you and the person across the table forms an impenetrable wall of silence--not the comfortable silence between friends, but the awkward hesitation of not knowing what to say. And it especially sucks when you remember how you used to talk for hours every day, but now you've grown too far apart to know how to relate to each other.

3a.
(a post within a post)

We sat on a ledge outside an apartment complex in LA, my feet dangling above the pavement as I sipped boba green tea with my friend of eleven years. Conversation came easily, naturally. We reminisced about high school and chatted about college, med school, relationships, life. For a while, time slowed down. Nothing seemed urgent. The little things in our lives that were worrisome or attention-demanding faded. Things were simple again--just two friends catching up after a long absence.

"Sometimes," he told me, "I feel like there are so many things in my life that I've done and have to do that I lose sight of reality. Everything moves so fast, and I wonder if this is actually my life. You know what I mean? But you... don't take this the wrong way, but I feel like you haven't changed at all. And when I talk to you, I know that this is my reality. You're my totem."

Sometimes, friendships get even better after a space of absence.

4.

the spaces between my fingers are right where yours fit perfectly
-owl city