Loneliness. 1.

Loneliness is the growing pit you feel in your stomach as you climb the stairs to the apartment that you have gradually turned into a home with your partner who is on a plane currently somewhere over the Atlantic. I started an entry like this a long time ago about a summer goodbye, but this feeling is so different from that time.

An infatuation, or even a more earnest love affair during youth is a cluster of elusive emotions: the constant status-checks, the insecurities of what tomorrow may bring, and the pressure cooker of modern-day romance turn many of those moments of pure connection into anomalous blips on the widescreen of neurosis in interpersonal relationships. In the lucky moment, we are conscious of how fleeting those moments are when they are happening, and we find some way to memorialize them, perhaps with a shiny coat of new paint for good measure. "Trust the memory more than the thing itself," Shawn Wong wrote in American Knees. Maybe we should question the memory, especially as it becomes more removed in time from the person you are now.

But as you grow with someone, adding to the newness of springtime a depth that only comes with time and patience, you realize that that was just little league. The struggle to make one life between two individuals, while respecting the needs, goals, and quirks of each of us, is the hardest thing I've ever had to do. I can give advice about many things, but relationships wouldn't be at the top of that list. And challenging yourself to bring new things into that space that you share with this person you've chosen to be your life partner... well, that's not easy either. Standard relationship entropy gives way to routine and patterns of interaction, responses, and interpretations.

With 12 days and a couple of continents between me and the one I love, I'll have a little time to think about who I am, and who I am with/out her. The loneliest moments are those few that come between finding a comfortable spot on the bed and drifting off into the nether domain of Dream, when the mind drifts towards the last few words you usually share with that person. The bookend conversations of your days and nights smoothly melting into one another even as your consciousness and hers mingle on the edge of sleep and beyond.

Relationships are hard work, and it's easy to waste a lot of time in battles of will that don't really matter. But I cannot imagine the alternative anymore.