I came into the past two months a bit blind. Family and friends ushered me abroad to Johannesburg, South Africa with heartfelt, temporary goodbyes and near-synchronous sighs of “Oh, how we’ll miss you!” I responded by shrugging off emotion and smartly retorting that these next several weeks would be no different than those spent in Charlottesville during the school year. Yes, I was many miles away, but at the end of the day, wasn’t going abroad just like going away to school?
I didn’t realize then how different it would be. Over 10,000 miles is quite a good ways, and after eight weeks without the little luxuries I had always taken for granted back home — being able to go for a run in the dark, driving down the road to meet friends, buying a basically bottomless Diet Coke from the convenience store, calling people without having to combat notoriously spotty WiFi, good coffee — I’ve become quite cognizant of the distance.
These bouts of “distance recognition,” if you will, have countless triggers. Something as simple as shaking Nestle instant coffee mix into a cup of steaming water brings forth a stream of oh-so Americana images in which I’m sipping mug after mug of filter coffee on a front porch, contemplating things past and making future plans. But moments like that are fleeting — I enjoy the present enough to be comfortable and take each day at a time.
Much more striking are events that have taken place back home while I’ve been away — not what I miss, but what I’ve missed.
Almost a week ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and, without thinking, grabbed my phone. Much to my surprise, it was completely lit up with messages — “Did you hear? Do you know? Can you believe it? I’m speechless.” That night, as I lay sleeping and catching up on rest after a “quick” weekend trip to Durban, a good high school friend of mine had died unexpectedly — a whole world away from where I was at the same moment.
Even if I had been home, my initial incredulity surrounding the suddenness, the randomness and the realness of the whole thing would have been enough to send me reeling backwards, totally thunderstruck and distracted by the never-ending stream of our memories shared and promises of a summertime reunion. But from where I was — an entire ocean and then some away — the reality of the tragedy seemed even less likely. It wasn’t real — it didn’t happen. Not possible.
Life in my high school hometown screeched to a quick, all-encompassing halt. Friends and strangers alike mourned together, found solace in shared emotions and steeped in each others’ memories. In Johannesburg, however, all was as it had been before. To the people I lived with, the people I worked with and the people I spent my own time with, life was life as usual. And so, for me, something that already seemed completely unbelievable was made much less, well, real.
Since I was removed from the situation at home entirely, my only persistent back-to-reality reminder of what happened was the ceaseless stream of in memoriam posts filling my newsfeed every time I logged onto social media.
Despite my awareness of this — that my feelings of unreality were relatively warranted — I became overrun with guilt. I wasn’t feeling and I wasn’t mourning — I was just shell-shocked, numb. I thought it wasn’t fair of me to feel so much nothingness, even if I were as physically distant as I was from the traumatic event.
I eventually reached out to others who had been at home in order to feel the hurt of our friend’s death from up close, but even such conversations continued to highlight the huge gap between my new “world” of two months and the whole other universe back home. I couldn’t join in with old friends to find comfort with them in person — I could only participate through some technological form of communication.
Undoubtedly, I was glad to be able to talk to people who knew the situation at hand, but never before had the distance between us been highlighted so prominently. As much as I enjoy being away and getting the chance to pretend I’m creating a whole new bright and shiny world for myself, I’ve learned over the past two months that distance is real. It sounds a simplistic epiphany to say it out loud, but it adds a certain weight to the idea of travel. While exploration and adventure and seeing what the world has to offer are undeniably admirable, recognizing the very-real distance involved in doing all of these things can help us appreciate where we already are and what we already have.
Mary’s column runs biweekly. She can be reached at m.long@cavalierdaily.com
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