Distance makes the heart grow fonder.
Which is cute in theory. But I couldn’t disagree more.
I think distance makes the heart ache. I think it makes you wish you could reach through time, through miles, through whatever little thing stands between you and the people you love, and find your way back to an ordinary day when they were just there.
Because I don’t love you any more now that you’re gone than I did when you were here. I loved you then. In the middle of all the nothingness that turned out to be everything. In the unplanned afternoons, the familiar laughter, the conversations that didn’t need a reason to begin or an ending to feel complete.
You were already the stars to me. I didn’t need the dark to tell me that.
And isn’t that the funny thing about love? Sometimes, we don’t realize how beautiful something is until we’re looking back at it. We get so caught up in living that we forget we’re living through things we’ll one day miss. We let the days pass, assuming there will always be another one just like them. Another chance to sit a little longer. Another ordinary moment with the people who make our lives feel like ours.
Until life does what life does. It changes.
People move. Seasons turn. We grow into versions of ourselves we couldn’t have imagined, and somewhere along the way, the people who used to be woven into the fabric of our everyday lives become people we have to make plans to see.
And we are happy for them. We really are.
But sometimes, don’t you wish you could keep everyone you love in one place? Just for a little while longer? Couldn’t the world give us a little more time before it starts rearranging all our favorite things?
I don’t want to miss you. I want to sit beside you. I want to tell you something stupid and hear you laugh. I want the kind of day that doesn’t feel worth remembering until years later, when I’d give anything to have it back.
I want the ordinary.
Maybe that’s what growing up is, in part. Learning that the things we want to hold on to most are often the things we cannot keep still. That people can mean the world to us and still find themselves on different roads. That loving someone doesn’t mean you get to have them nearby for every version of your life.
And maybe that’s okay. Maybe there is something beautiful about getting to know people at all, about finding one another in this enormous, ever-changing world and deciding, for a little while or for a lifetime, that we belong in each other’s lives.
What a privilege that is.
Out of all the people we could have met, we met them. Out of all the lives we could have lived, there were days when our lives overlapped in the most ordinary, extraordinary ways. We got to know the sound of their laughter. We got to be part of their stories. We got to love them in a thousand little ways that never seemed like much until we realized how much they meant.
What a privilege to have someone whose absence you can feel.
To have a place in your heart that still belongs to a person, even when their place beside you is empty. To have memories that ache a little, not because they weren’t beautiful, but because they were.
I think we spend so much time worrying about missing people that we forget what missing them means.
It means we had them.
It means there was a time when we laughed until our stomachs hurt, when we sat together without checking the clock, when their presence was so familiar we didn’t have to think about it. It means someone made an ordinary piece of our lives feel like something we wanted to keep forever.
And maybe the point isn’t to learn how to miss people better. Maybe it’s to learn how to notice them while they’re here.
To stop treating ordinary days like an endless supply. To look around the room every once in a while and recognize that the people in it are not just people passing the time with us. They are the time. They are the stories we’ll tell. The memories we’ll return to. The little pieces of our lives that will follow us long after the moment itself has passed.
Maybe that’s all we can really do. Learn to recognize the beautiful things while we’re still living inside them. To understand that the people sitting beside us today might one day be the people we wish we could sit beside again. That there is something extraordinary about a life that, in the moment, feels so wonderfully ordinary.
And maybe we don’t have to do anything about that feeling. Maybe we just have to let it remind us how lucky we are to be here, in this moment, with these people, living a life we might someday look back on and wish we could visit just one more time.
Because one day, you might find yourself looking back at this very moment, wishing you could step inside it again. And I hope when that day comes, you remember that you were there. That you got to have it. That, for a little while, the people you loved were right beside you, and life was happening exactly as it was supposed to.
Distance makes the heart grow fonder.
I don’t know about that.
I think the heart knows what it loves long before it ever has to miss it.
I think some people arrive in our lives and become the stars by which we know our way home. And no amount of distance could make them shine any brighter than they already do.
So no, I don’t love you more because you’re gone.
I loved you when you were here.
And what a privilege it was to have you.
Thinking of you,
Emi Sue
P.S. listen to “Rivers and Roads” by The Head And The Heart.
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