cara Esther,
I introduced myself to you a while ago as a six-thousand-thirst student, the kind who think they’re prepared, until they find themselves sitting at the school desk translating the Greek version in the third period on Thursdays and discover they can deliver a somewhat truncated translation, where the only correct sentences are those found with a magnifying glass and copied by Rocci, with a certain but rather naive satisfaction. Satisfaction that lasts just the time of the correction, because then punctually comes a five, the same number of fingers that your mother leaves you red in the face when she finds out. Well, perhaps the time has come to tell us, at least between us, a little in a whisper, that I have collected enough failings to transform me into one of those at risk of debt, if not even a rejection.
After the end of my long love as a disciple-six-minus-minus, He arrived, the extraordinary man, who made me feel like the first in the class of love, the Elena Greco who lives in America with her Nino Sarrator. And I’m telling you about America, not by chance, now he lives there and when you enter the decade of the thirties, one of the teachings that you should have internalized during the dreamy decade of the twenty clearly says: long-distance relationships are at the limit of the possible, when then in the relationship you they insert thousands of kilometers of land and sea, several hours of time difference and terrible hours of plane flight… Well, after a few months of love as-I-had-in-my-head-love comes the inevitable broken heart. From everything to nothing. A beating that is worth a failure in the high school exam, of those that arrive suddenly, stick on you during the summer and turn into a bad mood that lasts for centuries. Or, in this case, outright lovesickness. Months go by, I can’t forget it. I searched for new passions until they became obsessions but it didn’t help. There have been flirtations, love affairs, self-gifts, miles of travel around the world and above all miles and miles of running throughout Milan which even led me to sign up for a marathon (thank you: if you knew what legs now!), even a careful reading your little blue book, but nothing has really sanctioned the desired final closure.
I’m not going to give him the title of great love of my life, but in his defense it’s fair to add that he’s not an omm ‘e ‘shit like Nino, and the fact remains that there is something about him that makes the definitive closure project unfeasible. I deleted every chat, hid her social profiles, threw away everything I had of hers but nothing, not even this decluttering worthy of the upright Marie Kondo of the early days allowed me to clean up the memory drawer where I deposited all the memories. Pages of literature and hundreds of film titles teach that the only way to let go of a ghost is to find that unresolved something that still binds it to the here and now, but there is nothing suspended between us. He never showed up again, except for a few text messages months ago, and today he really disappeared.
Maybe I’m writing in the hope of replicating the beneficial effect of your previous answer, which had been the key to getting out of a bad relationship and starting a potentially great one if it hadn’t been for that awful little territorial detail, but anyway, Ester, once again I come to you with an impossible question: am I Penelope waiting for her Odysseus? If not, the worst question of all: how do you forget an unforgettable one?
Thanks again
AND.
Esther Viola’s answer
Esther Purple
Dear E. listen,
There’s only one thing to say about long-distance relationships: no, no, no. With every kilometer of separation on the map, one more notch of my-god-is-perfect. Of all the traps, this one?
The difference with respect to the other torments is that this torment can be extended ad libitum. Mine isn’t sentimental preconceived racism, it’s just that I want to be a good shepherd and take my sheep over the ravine. You don’t have all this time to get behind the American. You always seem to have time, but you don’t. It goes like this all my life, I know, but with distant loves things really get rotten.
The harshness of judgment is justified by practice. A former long-distance relationship writes to you. Absit iniuria, therefore. I was from the club, I know it well, it’s the dumbest pulpit one can start talking from and here I am. A prayer for my twenty years and may a sermon serve as an example for yours.
It always ends the same way. Anyone who has been there knows that writing and living apart brings
to the only result of making two bots happy to know each other, two strangers. Two strangers in the last stage. Writing is changing the planet. You become whoever you want. Between you and him there will never be too much watered-down pasta with tomato sauce, the sofa, a movie, a two-hour boredom. Everything tends to annoy, in the couple in presence. And that is the food of love. Thinking that winter is too long, then getting bitten by the same mosquitoes in June.
Do long distance relationships work?
Chat illusion. The words seem reliable, at first. They send hearts flying high, the right sentences. Because every line seems like a revelation, what is that writing if not your very true novel, affinity of character that uses its deadly means, the letters of the alphabet? You are lining up words and those words are stones.
Of course. The words are the popcorn between the phrases “this time it’s sublime love” and “but who is this, who knows him” after two months – if you get there – of stable attendance. Do you know what kept me from fully idealizing the remote man, the Peerless on the other side of the chat? Do you know what is the only thing that saved me when I fell in love with words me at my house and him at his house at twenty? Nothing.
Resign yourself to staying imaginary in love for a while longer
How did it go? She didn’t pass. I could not muster enough strength to stop.
I hate to be honest and not categorical: you don’t have much to do right now. There’s no persuasion that holds, against this flypaper, it is one of the dirtiest games of love, that of perfecting distance.
Resign yourself to staying imaginary in love for a while longer. Before then it’s useless to get excited, just wait. We have already said that the tendency to complicate relationships follows the fate of the common cold: if you don’t take care of it it lasts a week, if you take care of it it lasts a week.
This arid state of rejecting non-compliant relationships – typical of me, and I hope soon typical of yours too – can be reached through painful ways that no one can do for us. One would expect that at least in this procession of chapels the grieving madonnas (us) pierce hearts with originality. And instead:
Long distance love. Nobody like him
Written love. No one like him.
Unrequited love. Nobody like him.
Requited love with several. Nobody like him.
The maybe friend, the maybe not straight. Nobody like him.
Love of the ex who is with another. Nobody like him.
Love already married. Nobody like him.
You know that piece of High fedelity in which Rob talks about his years-old relationship with Laura that always ends up losing to the first girl that comes along? I know what’s wrong with Laura. What’s wrong with Laura is that I will never see her again for the first, second, or third time. Never again will I spend two or three days agitated, trying to remember what it looks like, never again will I arrive in a pub half an hour before my appointment, and stare at the same magazine article glancing at the clock every thirty seconds.
N. Hornby. Guanda high fidelity.
The long distance relationship is a repeat of intensity every time. It’s like selling heat to the Eskimos, it’s clear that everyone would like this couple. Self-regenerating. The Florida crab whose claw is detached and it grows back, just dive it back into the water.
There life is what you carry around in your head, writes Sally Rooney. Thought is like one puts himself, they say in Naples. And after these two powerful quotations that won’t help you, I raise a prayer to the penitent fathers, please send another Nino Sarratore, for this girl, but who is five metro stops away.
Write me soon.
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