I just googled it. I live 2,888 miles from people. 2,922 if I don’t want to pay tolls. Or, from $407 if I want to fly. One way.
Things are happening to those people. My brother is perfecting his meatball recipe. He’s ordering a slow cooker after months of carefully conducted research. He’s buying the Thanksgiving turkey from Williams & Sonoma and it’s arriving at my parents’ door in Massachusetts, a bird raised in California–where I live. After they ate dinner, my mom said over the phone, “It made me feel so close to you!”
Living far away from people puts things in perspective. And it makes you ask questions of yourself. And your choices. Specifically, “Why am I choosing to live far away from people?” It’s been just over a year. And I haven’t come up with a good answer. Which, at a certain point (say, a year), makes you ask another question, “Why am I still choosing to live far away from people?” And you come up with the inevitable answer, “No good reason.”
But that’s just me. Other people have good reasons. They have a good job. They fall in love. They need the specific planetary energy one can only find in Anchorage, Alaska. When all of their loved ones live in Mississippi.
You start to develop a network of new loved ones after some time and a level of effort that depends on what kind of person you are. I’m an introvert. An introvert who likes to write things. Including poetry. So you have an idea of about how much effort it takes me.
This year of living far away from people has boiled down to one very important thing. Before I left, I thought something was missing. And now, I know that I was wrong.
Maribeth Theroux 