Everyone knows that with love there is heartbreak. Hearts are practically the first thing you learn to be careful with. The bigger the love, the bigger the grief. Like the ABC’s. The grief you can recover from, but the love, no. That’s not something you get over. You can toughen up, forget about it and hold back watery eyes when it bubbles to the surface, but you never leave it. It sometimes makes me wish I never loved anything at all. That pit feeling thats not a hole but a mass that presses against everything in there. Knocks it aside like bowling pins and makes it hard to breathe. I’m months away from graduation and I never thought I would be, but I am. Today my best friend FaceTimed me and she usually doesn’t FaceTime me. She just called to call. I saw her yesterday and I’ll probably see her tomorrow, but definitely on Tuesday. I think I love her more than I’ve ever loved anything or anyone, and it’s so easy. She got into college the other day and has already committed. She told me all about it but all that I heard is that it’s an 8 hour flight. That’s a long ways away, and all that I really think about. She sounded different over the phone, as most people do. She has started to finish her sentences on a lower note. Like uhhh instead of ahhh. I know that because I just saw her. But 8 hours is a long ways, and the rest of our lives will last for the rest of our lives. In a year I probably will not have seen her yesterday, and I definitely won’t see her on Tuesday. She might call me and I’ll notice a bigger difference in her voice, maybe even one I can’t even point out. It’s like that game we played as kids “telephone”. Two people right next to each other understand completely different things. Sometimes I wish I had spent my childhood and toughest teenage years alone and misunderstood because love stretched tight over such a long distance hurts too much. I wish we had never met, I wish we had never become the other person in a way that cannot be reversed by anything. I wish I never had a love to lose. She might pick up a new phrase or joke and be too rushed to explain it over the phone, that she will tell me all about everything when I come to visit, and inch by inch, we will leave each other behind. Years will be spent over the phone, pretending like we just saw each other yesterday when I can’t remember what the back of her head looks like, what her real voice sounds like, another part of what we knew of each other fading away into nothing through a spotty, long-distance call. Playing a sad game of telephone until forever, or something.
