When He's Gone

I’m in a long-distance relationship. My boyfriend is French, and I live in New York. For the past three months, he’s been staying with me at my place. On Monday—the day this post will go live—he’ll go back to Europe.

This isn’t a post I could write on the day it’ll get published. So I’m writing this on the Saturday before he leaves, in a quiet second-floor café in Williamsburg, with the snow coming down outside. He’s sitting across from me, working on his own book (we’re both writers).

There is something incredibly sweet about being with someone, each of us engrossed in our own projects, but fundamentally together. I love being able to look up at him and share a smile over laptop screens. I love watching him absorbed in his work, and looking up to see he’s been watching me.

I know that today will go fast and Sunday will go faster and then, by the time this is published, he’ll be gone. I wish I could slow this moment down. I wish time was malleable and I could stretch it out right here, where I want to stay—in this warm place, in this unremarkable, perfect moment. 

 My boyfriend and I have been together for several years. We see each other for a few months at a time, and often we meet in far-flung locations. When he’s not here, I live by myself and set my own rules, and I love it. Our relationship isn’t conventional, but for us, it’s worked. Still, there are times when I wish that whenever we were together, I wasn’t so aware of how precious our time is, and how little we have.

When he goes, I’ll be fine. I’ll hang out with my friends in New York and I’ll Skype with my friends in other cities and I’ll throw myself into my work. I’ll buy some new shoes I don’t need and get a haircut and remember again how to relish the feeling of coming home to an empty apartment at the end of a busy day. I know how to make myself happy on my own—something I think of as a hard-won secret superpower—and I think that makes me better able to love others. But being able to live happily on my own doesn’t mean I’ll always want to, or that I won’t miss him terribly.