Tag: distance

534: “Much Together” (D’Arcy McNickle)

                “Even then, it seemed, they said but little to each other, yet nothing went unsaid that needed saying.
                In those days they were much together.”
                -D’Arcy McNickle The Surrounded

                My sibling’s visiting for a week. In the kitchen just now, actually, baking bread. Ten minutes ago we were lounging on the couch together. Earlier today we were walking beneath sycamores. (I love sycamores: the patterned bark, the broad leaves, the nobby branches like fairytale walking sticks or heretale hands waving hello). I think I feel a pressure, when I get to see a loved one again after a long time apart, to try and say everything. To talk it all out: the catching up, the reorienting, the worrying, hoping, planning, sharing. And I really do like talking. I am, I think most of my loved ones would agree, a talker. But I’ve also been sitting—or walking—with the limitations of all that saying. The saying (for me) can be a way of trying to undo the distance we also live in, our lives growing in different places. It works in some ways, and in some ways it doesn’t. More than words, what I want is our connections. And when we also live far apart, when we are together, I want that time together. Here is still a distance, not undone but not all-doing. And here’s our closeness. And here are these walks beneath the sycamores, shared steps, shared stillnesses. We are much together.

by Azlan

510: “A Community’s Emotional Lives” (Billy-Ray Belcourt)

                “I would write a book that reflected a community’s emotional lives rather than just my sensory experience of the present. […] In talking to those who came from where I came from, I also hoped light would be shed on the person I was or the person I might become.”
                -Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree), A Minor Chorus, p. 29-30

                I’ve been wanting to write a post on this quote since October or so. And I haven’t been able to. It’s funny: there are few books I’ve picked up and fallen in love with more deeply than Belcourt’s A Minor Chorus, and still, in the months since I started, I haven’t finished. I think that’s because I realized this book would be useful for my research, and that pushed me toward reading to finish it, and that’s not how I’d started reading. Not how I wanted to read. I wanted to respect it as what I first recognized it to be, which might be something like a meeting place.
                All this is on my mind tonight because I just ran over to my friend Vuyo’s apartment to drop off A Minor Chorus and Belcourt’s This Wound is a World. Vuyo’s thinking through some of her own writing, and these will join the conversations on her page. And all of a sudden this book—which stopped feeling alive to me when I wanted to take something from it; which I had gotten far away from, so even as it sat on my bedside table or my bed or my dresser or my kitchen table, I didn’t read it—this book feels really close. I want to read it, just as I’ve left it with my friend. I think it’s because the book’s enmeshed, again, for me, in a community of relationships. Mine. Billy-Ray’s. Vuyo’s. And more than why, there’s a poignant reminder in the nearness and farness, the wish to read at the moment when the book’s with a friend. Maybe some kinds of being apart weaving through some kinds of being together is part of understanding yourself through a living community. Maybe the emotional lives I’m thinking about unfold in the ways we both have and don’t have a touch of one another. Like a book I’ll fall in love with all over again when it comes back, after missing it, after enjoying the thought of it in my friend’s hands, talking with her.

by Azlan

498: “Long-Distance Love” (Ishita Dharap)

                “The Long-Distance Love-Letters program has been rescheduled to take place on Sat, February 22, 2 pm, at Krannert Art Museum.” -Ishita Dharap, in an email sent out this afternoon

                I messaged my dear friend Ishita on December 2nd, inviting her to come over and enjoy dinner and a cozy fire. She was in India with her family, she said, and she sent a picture of a truly delicious dinner that I would’ve loved to share. I met her family once. We talked about joy and rest and becoming an interwoven family as leaves rustled overhead and the stars came out in a deepening sky.
                Ishita and I messaged each other again on January 3rd, looking for a moment to catch up, but we wouldn’t be back in the same town until January 12th. Then things were busy. Now it’s mid February. Whenever we catch up, my friend, it won’t be soon enough—and at the same time, all this—and her email today—has me thinking about how the joy and curiosity and support of our friendship isn’t something put off to that scheduled moment where we can see each other in the craziness of our current political moment. That joy and curiosity and support is already woven all through: long distance love, sweet and playful and sad as we say hello from close and far away.
        I haven’t been to Ishita’s Long Distance Love-Letters museum program. Not yet. But I’ve seen her write about it (in a book and a journal article), I’ve talked with her about it, and in imagining it I’ve felt it. Maybe that’s because I’m thousands of miles away from so many of the people I love. Maybe that’s because the stories I often hear told about “long distance” are about missing, about absence. Ishita’s work makes me think back through all the ways that missing and remembering are kinds of touching and playing and learning and being together. It helps me feel that so many of my beloved absences are presences, day after day, in so many ways.

by Azlan