I Am In a Long Distance Relationship
I'm getting lost, and I can feel it happening. He lives in Canada and I'm in the US, 2000 miles away from my boy, 2222 miles to be exact. Point six, or something, but whatever, that's just because we've talked about it. That's just it, we talk about everything, we've talked forever and I talked myself into a four-digit phone bill for one month, but that's a different story. We talk every night at length, sometimes several times a day, and we still haven't gotten tired of each other or run out of things to talk about. We fight, of course, just like any other couple, and yell and call each other names, but there's never any doubt that we'll make up and things will be fine.
We've known each other for a year and a half, and have been officially together for the past five months, and the good times have been the best of my life... But all the times in between? When you go out and you don't have a hand to hold or you listen to your best friend talk about this amazing date she went on with this new guy she's dating or when you go to events by yourself or with friends when everyone else is up in couples... You start to feel like some unloved social reject who can't get a boyfriend despite how you do have a boyfriend, and you are very much loved by someone, it's just someone who's not present.
And of course, people who've never been in a long-distance relationship don't understand. I mean, hell, I used to be that kind of person, swearing up and down that I'd never be in a long distance relationship, because they never work out, and there's room for your significant other to cheat on you, and it'll get boring real fast, etc etc etc. But then I fell in love, completely by accident, and learned first hand that you don't choose who you fall in love with no matter how difficult things are.
We knew from the beginning that this wasn't some fling, from the very beginning that it was going to go places, and one of us would have to make a pretty life-changing move. He's studying to be a doctor who's really close to his family and I'm a recent college drop out with tumultuous family relations, so it was never really much of a toss-up.
So now I get to pit my fear of immigrating to another country against this undying desire to be with him, and when I say undying, I mean completely unbearable. It's making me miserable, miserable to the point that I'm a completely different person than I used to be. I used to be fierce and independent and a go-getter, someone who stood up for herself and would never let a man rule her and who didn't need a boy to have a good time, didn't ever cry over men and didn't mind a new beau every weekend. Then...yeah, then I fell in love, and I'm pathetic. My entire life revolves around missing him some days, and I can't stand it anymore, and the only way to fix it is going to be with him. But suffice it to say when I was little I didn't have dreams of growing up to be a Canadian. A veterinarian (before I could ever spell 'veterinarian' or an artist (until my grandmother told me terrible stories of 'starving artists') or a writer, oh god did I want to be a writer (and still do, but that's been on the back burner for a while now), but not a Canadian. I saw myself moving back home to Dallas or New York City or Miami or Los Angeles or Las Vegas, but I always said I had to be in the big city somewhere, downtown in the middle of everything. Not Canada, where it seems everything is an hour's drive apart and there's more wilderness and empty prairie than I ever hoped to encounter in my entire life, let alone daily.
Besides all that there's swallowing my pride and putting my head on straight and handling the legal aspect, and finding a way to convince the Canadian government that I'm not the complete deadbeat I appear to be on paper and that there is a good reason they should let me into the country despite that I am not a skilled worker and am no longer a student and I don't have any specific prospects of employment when I get there. "We could get married," he said, dubiously, one night when I was bemoaning the prospect. "Yeah. Someday," I said. "But not for that." I'm not going to have a shotgun court house wedding before we've ever lived together, I may not be the girliest girl on the block but I'll be damned if I don't want to wear that pretty white dress and make him write his own vows - someday. In the meantime, that's out of the question.
So face up to the fear and the self-doubt, or be miserable apart from him. That's what it comes down to. Coldplay couldn't put it best - nobody said it was easy, but nobody said it would be this hard.
By:
jukeboxjuly
Age:
19-21
,
Female
