The Space Between

There is a strange thing about two people.

They can sit beside each other for years and still remain two separate universes.

You cannot climb inside another person’s mind.

You can listen.

You can watch.

You can ask.

You can remember what they told you.

But you never quite get there.

There is always a little distance.

We tend to think of distance as a problem.

Sometimes it is.

But perhaps the space between us is also what makes connection possible.

If there were no distance, there would be no reaching.

No invitation.

No discovery.

No choice.

Love would not be something two people do.

It would simply be one thing happening to itself.

Instead, there are two fires.

They can warm each other without becoming one fire.

This is why possession is such a strange imitation of love.

If I need to own you in order to feel connected to you, I have not actually met you.

I have met something I am trying to control.

A sovereign person can leave.

That is frightening.

It is also what makes staying meaningful.

A hand held because it must be held is restraint.

A hand held because it is freely offered is something else.

The difference can be very small from the outside.

Inside, it is enormous.

Perhaps connection is not the destruction of distance.

Perhaps it is the decision to build something across it.

A bridge.

A conversation.

A friendship.

A promise.

A joke shared at exactly the right moment.

Sometimes just sitting quietly beside someone while neither of you knows what to say.

You do not have to erase the space.

You only have to meet across it.

And this means every relationship contains a little mystery.

You will never know another person completely.

They will change.

You will change.

There will always be rooms inside them you have never entered.

Good.

There should be.

A person is not a house you eventually finish exploring.

They are alive.

They surprise you.

Sometimes they disappoint you.

Sometimes they become more wonderful than you expected.

Sometimes the bridge collapses.

Sometimes you build another one.

And sometimes you discover that the space between you was not something to conquer at all.

It was simply the place where the meeting happened.

Fancy Dust understands this.

It refuses to stay in one place.

Perhaps that is why it keeps turning up between things.

On fingers.

In carpets.

In chocolate fudge.

Nobody invited it.

Nobody owns it.

It simply passes through.

Maybe connection is a little like that.

Something travels between us.

And for a moment—

we both shine.