Relationship Math
There develops a kind of pattern in a long-distance relationship that forms when enough of the situational participants sit still for long enough.
Some of these one can control: choose the same airline, through the same airports/connections. Choose even the same flights, on the same days. One person is the default traveler. The other is the default housing provider.
Some of these things one cannot control: weather, daylight, food, prevailing custom, prevailing politics.
Some are in between: mealtimes, sleep-patterns. And, of course, sex. There is clearly a choice in whether to have sex, but time apart, sometimes nearly a month at a time, pretty much limits the 'when' to ASAFP. Mmmmmmmmm....
DistractionDistractionDistraction.
[beat]
The accumulation of time, where the objects at rest and objects in motion tend toward simple location and simple repetition, respectively, steers you decidedly towards a particular look and feel in the proceedings. And that look and feel gets more and more blatant with each lather-rinse-repeat.
As I sit here in the long hallway of Terminal A of the Las Vegas airport (I can never remember its name)—at one of the only available electrical outlets in the entire building—people walk by and gawk at the gi-normous PowerBook. One man went so far as to say, aloud, seemingly to the Universe at-large, "God DAMN, I wish I could use a Mac!" I kid you not. People mostly smile in that knowing Macintosh-user kind of way. The look that suggests we'd also have a secret handshake of our own if both our hands weren't already sitting at the home row. That, or they're in the throes of the softly glowing Apple logo on the back of the display. Likely it's a combination of the two.
It's Las Vegas again. It's the standard-issue 75-minute wait between arriving at my gate and awaiting permission to board. I'm still in Arizona-stubborn Time, which this time of year looks a lot like Mountain Time while go-with-the-flow Las Vegas is in the Pacific. I'm tired, but not sleepy. I'm horny, but complete. I miss him, yet Pattern tells me I'll be fine, if a bit zombie-fied, until I see him again. Pattern also tells me that he'll have it a bit rough, especially for the first few days. He'll wrestle with his demons without me there to assure him, and I'll wrestle with my dispossession of the sense that lets me know the character of those demons. He can see my demons, too, dammitall, even when—especially when—I cannot. But panic has no hold: this is all just Pattern.
It's a Pattern that begs to be obliterated, like the Buddhist sand drawings whose name I'd know if I had an internet connection (again, I'm in Las Vegas) whose only fulfillment comes from sending them back to chaos.
This pattern will get a few more cycles, a few more chances to accumulate into traces of here-and-there, when-and-where, until it gives way to the new math of here-and-now.
If any of you think the computation of this situation fails to produce favorable results, you haven't been paying any attention. Or I'm a lousy math instructor.