Three time zones.
That is the practical version of the distance. Three time zones and a flight I have taken four times now and will take again, that has become its own kind of rhythm, the particular routine of a mother who travels to her child rather than the other way around because the child is building a life and the life is rooted where it is rooted and the mother can go to the life because the mother has the flexibility now, has the retired Tuesday and the open calendar and the willingness to be in a middle seat for four hours because at the other end of the middle seat is her daughter.
I thought the distance would feel like absence.
It does, sometimes. In the particular way that distance feels like absence when you are used to proximity, when the relationship was built in the same house and the same kitchen and the same car driving to and from things, when the knowing of each other was inseparable from the daily physical presence. The absence of that is real. I do not minimize it.
But the distance is also something else.
It is proof that she went. That the going happened and the going worked and she is somewhere building the life that was hers to build and the building is going well because I can hear it in her voice, the particular quality of a person who is in the right place, who has found the room that was shaped like her, who is not performing her life but living it. That is in her voice now. I can hear it from three time zones away, across the middle seat and the four hours and the particular miracle of a phone that lets me hear her breathing before she speaks.
The distance is also love.
The love that was large enough to let her go. The love that did not ask her to stay closer for my comfort. The love that packed her up in August and drove her to the airport and put her on a plane to the life that was hers and came home to the quiet house and called it good because it was good, because she is good, because the three time zones between us are filled with the life she is living and the life I am living and the love that connects them, which does not require proximity to be real, which is in fact the test of whether the love was ever about the person or about the comfort of having them near.
It was always about her. The distance proves it. I am glad to be proved right.
