He is asleep when I am awake. I am asleep when he is awake. This has been true for two years and seven months, and I have come to understand it not as an obstacle but as a strange grammar we both speak fluently now.
The four a.m. text isn't desperate. It's morning over there. He's making tea. He's telling me the tea is too strong, like always, and that the woman on the bus had a hat shaped like a small cathedral.
The slow text
When you can't reply for eight hours, you stop replying with reflex. You write back with intention. There is no "haha" — there's "this made me laugh out loud at the bakery and the man behind the counter looked at me." Asynchronous love demands a kind of full sentences I'd forgotten I was capable of.
Distance does not destroy intimacy. It just removes the option to be lazy with it.
I will see him in nineteen days. I will not be eloquent in person. I will say things like "I'm hungry" and "this airport rug is ugly." That, too, will be a kind of love.
— Fin —