Love at the Speed of Email

by Lisa McKay

  “We’ve talked about almost everything else under the sun but we couldn’t manage to clarify our relationship status before addressing it in email?” I asked. “And not just any email, mind you, a mass email?”

  Mike rolled his eyes and grinned.

  “Technicality,” he said.

  By the time we parted ways five days later at Melbourne Airport, we were utterly exhausted, emotionally overloaded, and officially dating.

  I sat alone in my departure lounge, waiting to board my flight back to Los Angeles, and thought about the charged intensity of the last two weeks – of Mike’s smile, the way he made me laugh, the night we finally shared our first kiss and the sandy applause I heard when I dropped the pair of sandals I was holding to the beach so that I could wrap my arms around him. Then I wondered whether I would ever see Mike again.

  Los Angeles – Accra – Washington, D.C. – Sydney – Zagreb – South Bend – Nairobi – San Diego – Atlanta – Madang – Kona – Canberra – London – Baltimore – Itonga – Vancouver – Harare – Dushanbe – Lira – Petats – Port Moresby – Brisbane – Ballina - Malibu

  Love Long Distance

  Los Angeles, USA

  I never did get an answer to the letter I sent to Travis telling him I’d be moving out a couple of days after I got back to L.A. I didn’t get an answer to the letter I sent to his sister and mother either – a long, frank record of what I had seen unfold over the previous eight months. Without more tangible family support and some antipsychotic medication, I told them, I wasn’t sure how much longer Travis could continue to cope the way he was currently coping. His life was unraveling.

  When I boarded the plane in Melbourne, I wasn’t sure what I’d find on the other end of my journey. It probably wasn’t the wisest decision I’ve ever made to get off the plane in Los Angeles and go straight back to our apartment alone, but that’s what I did.

  I was hugely relieved when I got there to find Travis at home, alive, and in apparently decent spirits. As it turned out, he had gotten my letter and wasn’t overjoyed that I was moving out, but he didn’t appear to be unduly dented by the news either. He didn’t mention anything about my letters to his family. And he was going to Las Vegas that weekend.

  I was moved out by the time he got back.

  More than a dozen of my friends showed up on Saturday to help me relocate. I am not used to being so completely on the receiving end of kindness, and it was profoundly overwhelming and touching to see this friendly troupe boxing up my kitchen, disassembling my bed, and carting my couch out the door. About five hours after we’d started I was standing alone in my new apartment, surrounded by hundreds of books piled in haphazard stacks, realizing that I hadn’t contacted Edison about the electricity at the new apartment.

  Hence I wouldn’t have any for five days.

  I didn’t really mind not having any electricity. It was a good excuse not to do any unpacking after it got dark or buy groceries or cook for myself. At night I navigated by the light of my laptop screen while the computer battery lasted and pretended I was living in Botswana, until I remembered that I probably would not have a laptop if I really were living in Botswana. Then I pretended I was camping.

  *

  I had thought that I would mourn my old apartment. That place was layered with memories of hellos and goodbyes, movie nights and intimate dinners, long talks, laughter, and tears. I knew how to turn the tap just so for the right water temperature in the shower. I could walk downstairs at night in the dark to get a drink without fear of tripping. I knew the sound of the front door opening and closing, of the fountain that splashed in the courtyard. That familiarity was precious.

  But by the time I finally moved out, none of that mattered in the slightest anymore. I still did feel sad and angry, but it wasn’t over losing a place. On that front I felt nothing but relief and exhaustion. At some point since Travis had fallen through a portal in his mind, that apartment had ceased to be a home. The uncertainty, helplessness and fear I felt in the face of his unpredictable volatility had rendered familiarity completely moot and vanquished any sense of sanctuary. It had become more emotionally taxing to come home in the evenings than to travel solo to Nairobi.

  My new apartment was devoid of electricity, gas, home phone, internet, and memories, but it was pure joy to leave work and be able to relax instead of having to take the energy levels up another notch. It was luxury to walk into space that was empty and silent. I loved that the walls in this new place were painted a cheerful panoply of yellow, orange and red. I loved seeing the mountains from the kitchen as they traced out a jagged horizon behind the tops of the palm trees. I loved the two big trees in the courtyard that formed a thick green shield against my neighbor’s windows.

  If the electricity company had told me that it couldn’t turn the power on for a year, I would just have bought a flashlight and stayed anyway.

  *

  I wasn’t the only one who left Australia and returned to a chaotic move on the home front. In the wake of the last robbery, Mike’s colleagues had indeed moved him out in his absence. He returned to Papua New Guinea to find what remained of his belongings piled in boxes in his area manager’s office.

  “I can’t look through it just yet,” he wrote to me. “I can’t bear to find out what’s not there.”

  What Mike had instead of worldly possessions was a new boss, a new house and a new housemate, Tristan, who was out in the field the night Mike arrived but who’d thoughtfully left behind a set of keys and a note letting Mike know he’d killed seventy cockroaches in the new place the night before. Also, Mike had a new girlfriend on the other side of the world.

  We were so used to communicating via letters that we hadn’t give much thought to whether or how we were actually going to talk once we’d decided to date. And with both of us moving and returning to work, thieves having relieved Mike of his laptop microphone, and limited access to the internet on both sides of the Pacific, we also didn’t figure out the talking thing until some time after we had returned to our respective sides of the world.

  Two weeks after getting back to L.A. I was sitting on the couch in my new apartment on a Saturday night, writing, when my mobile phone rang. The display read “No Caller ID,” which usually meant someone overseas, and I picked it up expecting my brother.

  The line wasn’t working that well and neither was my brain, apparently. Before I relay the conversation, I have to pause for some disclaimers. I didn’t know that Mike had my mobile phone number. I wasn’t sure it was technically possible for him to call me from where he was. I had never talked to him on the phone before. And I was writing. I was therefore vague. Very vague.

  “Hi,” Mike said. “So, do you like surprises?”

  Hmmm, it’s a guy’s voice. Not Matt. Probably foreign friend. Possibly foreign friend flying into L.A. tonight who wants a couch to crash on. Crap, I don’t want to drive to LAX to pick someone up tonight! “Uh … sometimes.”

  Mike said something about sitting on a rock looking out over the Pacific Ocean.

  Hmmm, mystery guy friend trying to mess with me by pretending to be Mike. Who would be that mean? Okay, let’s face it, a lot of my friends would be that mean.

  I had no idea who it was, but for some reason I was firmly convinced that it wasn’t Mike. After we’d traded several more sentences I finally sighed and asked, “Ah, who is this?”

  “Your secret admirer from PNG.”

  Hmmmm, he didn’t say Mike, he said secret admirer. That’s something a mean friend might say.

  It took about three awkward minutes for me to accept that it actually was Mike, and about thirty seconds after that (while I was still trying to pretend that I normally acted like such a weirdo at the start of phone calls) the line went dead. I was left with no way to call him back and no way to even debrief by sending an email, because the new apartment didn’t yet have working internet. I went to bed with the phone that night in case Mike managed to ring again and stewed for hours a
bout the fact that I hadn’t recognized my own boyfriend’s voice on the phone and must have come across as a suspicious freak.

  Were we insane to think we could make this work? I mean, how often do you really hear of long-distance relationship success stories outside of novels set before or during World War II?

  *

  After all the time we spent in Australia sitting on my parents’ porch swing and talking about every topic under the sun (a time Mike referred to with a straight face and complete seriousness as our “due diligence period”), we entered the long-distance dating game confident. I even told Mike, one warm afternoon, that I was good at distance.

  Mike, I found out later, had thought that was particularly amusing.

  “Hello, Lisa who’s good at distance,” Mike emailed me a couple of days after our Melbourne farewells, in response to a note of my own bemoaning our separation. “This is Mike who’s not good at remembering details, but he remembered that particular detail because he wanted to tell Lisa that she was on crack but figured that might ruin the moment on the porch swing, and Lisa might think he was an insensitive ape, and then Lisa would kick his ass onto the first plane to Melbourne and Mike wasn’t prepared for that. But now that some time has passed and approximately 7,000 miles of ocean buffer us: You are so on crack.”

  “I would like to point out,” I wrote back, “that however hard this first week apart has felt, we must both be somewhat good at distance or we would never have decided to embark on this crazy path. Being good at it, however, doesn’t mean it doesn’t still suck. I am quite talented at doing a number of things I really hate.”

  Whether or not Mike and I really were good at distance, distance was probably good for us in some important ways.

  Having nothing to build our relationship with but words for the following three months forced us to cover a lot of ground. Doing this when we couldn’t exchange text messages and were only able to talk by Skype every couple of days for an hour or two also removed some of the pressures and pitfalls that attend 24-hour accessibility and the possibility of instantaneous response. Distance slowed us down, granted us extra time and space to think, and encouraged us to be deliberate and thorough in our communication.

  But the distance was also often difficult. There was the temptation to feel as if my “real life” was on hold until Mike arrived in May for a month of holidays – to live in such a haze of anticipation that it obscured the beauty of the present. It took effort and energy to rearrange my schedule so that we could talk, or to prioritize writing letters when I was exhausted or flat. Mike was sometimes out in the villages and beyond even the reach of cell phones for a week or more, and these stretches of silence sometimes assaulted my sense of surety in the concept of us and prompted mood swings that hit without warning. I could be grocery shopping, looking forward to a quiet night at home with Indian food, red wine and my laptop, and then glance up to see a couple ahead of me, hand in hand, and I’d be swamped by a sudden wave of longing or doubt.

  In those moments I never had the option of reaching for the phone just so I could hear Mike’s voice, and even when we were talking during our carefully scheduled Skype dates, it wasn’t guaranteed to be smooth and happy sailing. Occasionally we’d be chattering away easily one minute only to find ourselves mired in a messy miscommunication the next. Or we’d be laughing and a moment later one of us would have blundered unexpectedly into a virtual minefield.

  This was the situation we found ourselves in late one night, about a month before Mike was to arrive in L.A. for his May holiday. We’d been talking for an hour already, but before we wrapped up I suggested we dip into the question box.

  The question box was a game we used sometimes to help move us past the whats, whens, and hows of our days. A solid plastic rectangle, it held hundreds of small cards each printed with a different question.

  What is one special holiday memory from childhood?

  If you had to move to a foreign country indefinitely, which one would you choose?

  What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?

  This night, however, the card that I randomly selected focused on a topic much weightier than ice cream. I took a glance and wondered whether I should throw it back and pick another one.

  “What’s the question?” Mike asked after I’d been silent for a couple of seconds.

  “Okay,” I said, deciding to stick with it, “what’s the most important quality in a marriage?”

  “Commitment,” Mike said immediately. Then he paused and talked around this concept for a while, trying on words like honesty and forgiveness.

  “No,” he finally said decisively. “Commitment.”

  Sleepy and relaxed, I opened my mouth and started to think out loud. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think it’s affection or warmth or … kindness. Yeah, kindness. I’d rank that above commitment.”

  There was silence on the other end of the Skype line.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Is that because commitment would already be there?” Mike asked.

  “I guess so,” I said. “I can’t easily see a relationship that’s full of affection and kindness not being built on some foundation of commitment, but I can envision it the other way around – a committed relationship lacking kindness – and that’s just ugly.”

  Again, silence.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “I’m a bit paralyzed right now,” the distant Mike finally replied. “I think I’m better at commitment than I am at affection. I don’t think I can discuss this anymore at the moment. I have to get back to the office over here anyway.”

  “Oh,” I said, startled. “Uh, okay. That’s not one of my fears in relation to us by the way, that you’re not good at affection, but all right.”

  “It’s not you, I’ve just stumbled over some of my own inner furniture,” Mike managed to reassure me before signing off. “We’ll talk soon.”

  We did talk soon, but not before I spent an uncomfortable couple of days wondering where I’d gone wrong. Perhaps, I ventured to my parents after thinking it through, it was the moment when I opened my mouth after Mike had bared his soul and insinuated that I didn’t think commitment was that big a deal and that I’d be in a marriage only as long as the other person was being kind.

  “Yeah, that might have done it, I’d say,” Mum said.

  “Mum!” I said.

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” she said, negating any reassurance the statement might have delivered by laughing immediately afterward.

  “I do think commitment is hugely important,” I said. “And I know any commitment – to marriage, to a place – is going to have times when it’s tested. I was just saying that I’m not sure commitment is the be-all and the end-all. I mean, would I really want to stay in a marriage indefinitely if commitment was all it had going for it? Commitment might be effective glue, but surely kindness or something else has to be present much of the time to make it worth holding something together?”

  Mum didn’t venture to touch that one.

  “What do you think is the most important quality in a marriage, then?” I asked her.

  “Balance,” she said.

  “Balance?” asked my father, who’d been listening in from the other side of the study.

  “Balance,” my mother repeated firmly. “What have other people said?”

  “Well, two of my colleagues said trust,” I said, “and another one said goodwill. They defined that as the commitment to hold a good image of that person in your mind even when you’re not liking them in the moment.”

  “Does anyone want to know what I think?” Dad asked in my favorite tone of voice, that of the patient martyr.

  Apparently it’s Mum’s favorite tone of voice, too, because she was quicker off the mark than I was.

  “Not really,” Mum said breezily.

  “Yes, Dad,” I said, rolling my eyes at both of them. “We want to know what you think.”

  “A commitment to love,” he
announced. “It combines commitment and kindness.”

  “That is not a single quality,” Mum replied.

  “And balance is?” Dad asked.

  In one way, this opportunity Mike and I had to probe our joys, sorrows, and thoughts across the miles when we might otherwise have been discovering what snacks we each liked at the movie theater was providing us with a deep and solid foundation. But it was also rendering our quirks as adorable abstractions and robbing us of small daily opportunities to identify differences and head off or resolve conflict. Then, when we did happen to stumble into these differences or miscommunications, they often seemed magnified by the miles between us. I had made huge progress since the end of my relationship with Jason, and I no longer shied away at the first hint of potential conflict. I still didn’t enjoy conflict, however, and although Mike (despite his fears on this front) was excellent at communicating affection across the miles, we couldn’t always resolve a conversation satisfactorily when one of us stumbled across our inner furniture. During those times, I had to battle to control my own insecurities and learn to live with the tension of the unresolved until we could talk things out.

  There were more than a handful of days when one or both of us struggled to stay grounded.

  “Since leaving the office yesterday afternoon, I’ve felt blah,” Mike wrote to me a couple of weeks after we parted ways in Melbourne. “No one particular reason, and that makes it more difficult. I don’t like feeling blah; it means that I don’t feel like doing anything, that I don’t feel excited about anything. It means absence of passion. I fear blah. So how about to our official post-Ballina discussion topics list I add: ‘What do you do when you feel blah?’”

  “When I feel blah everything sort of flattens out and goes two-dimensional,” I replied. “The day elongates and everything takes more effort – doing the ‘shoulds’ of the day, talking to people, caring. I don’t taste fun. It’s like the bubbles go out of life. On the worst days, nothing I say or do comes out quite right and I feel as if I’m talking to people through an invisible filter that’s skewing everything, the way that gazing at objects underwater distorts perception. And what do I do when I feel like this? That’s a question I wish I had a simple answer to.”