▸ Column · Contemporary New York City — the present-day world Raphael and Leonardo inhabit, where the surface world's real obstacles (immigration bureaucracy, family caregiving, the distances of modern life) are recognizable against the backdrop of their underground home.
RAPHAEL replies.
The letter
My partner and I have been together two years, most of it long-distance — she's in Lisbon caring for her mother who has dementia and can't leave; I'm in Toronto on a work visa that would cost me my whole path to residency if I walked away from the job attached to it. Neither of us can move, and every time we sit down to make a plan, the plan just grows another someday. Last week she told me she can't keep building toward a future that has no date on it, and I haven't been able to answer her since. I love her. I don't want to give this up. But I'm starting to ask whether love is enough when there's no version of the calendar where we're actually in the same room. How do you stay in something that has no visible horizon?
Raphael replies
Here's what I know about loving people you can't get to: it teaches you one useful thing, and it's not how to close the distance. It's how to stop lying about what the distance is doing to you.
I grew up in a literal hole in the ground, and the people I'd burn everything for were up there on the surface. Six hours on a plane is nothing compared to six feet of concrete — but the conversation you're having, the careful one, where you both say you love each other and then go quiet? I know that conversation. My brothers and I got real good at it for a while. Everyone holding the real thing back because saying it out loud felt like it would break something. Splinter used to call it cowardice dressed up as kindness. That one stayed with me.
So here's the thing sitting in the quiet that neither of you has put words to yet: the fear isn't "will we end up together." The fear is "what if we keep burning through ourselves for this, and the calendar still never moves." That's the one with no address. That's the one that's doing all the damage. Say that one. To her, in those words.
I can't promise the visa works out or her mother gets better. What I can tell you is the honest conversation — the one you've both been too careful to have — is the only version where you're actually still inside this together, instead of just running out the clock being polite about it.
— Raphael
Leonardo weighs in
Raph's going to tell you to say the scary thing. He's not wrong that you haven't. But that's Raph's answer, and Raph's answer is built for the conversation, not the calendar.
Here's what I see: you've both stopped planning anything because you can't plan everything. My sensei had us run the same kata before every mission whether or not we could see the objective. The drill wasn't about knowing the end. The drill was about staying capable of the next step.
You don't have a path to the same city yet. You have a path to the next visit. The month where she flies instead of you. Who covers the hard weeks when her mother declines. Build that — the ninety-day plan, not the someday plan. Be inside that together. The permanent horizon doesn't have to appear before you take the next step toward each other.
Raph says name the fear. I say: name the Tuesday.
— Leonardo
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