If You Can't Sweeten Your Green Tea, My Bad

I'm slowly making this Starbucks Splenda-less, two or three packets at a time. It's stealing really, because I don't use the sweetener. In fact, I hate it. My girlfriend swears by the stuff, however, and I'm clinging to anything that reminds me of her: Christmas presents, pictures, checking Manhattan's daily weather, and swiping extra Splenda from Starbucks just like she would(though she takes two or three handfuls).

We've been long distance for almost two years, and leaving New York gets harder and harder. With every visit, my Greyhound Bus deadline inches across the clock. It started at the ground level of three in the afternoon(I need time to grocery shop!), sunk to five(Monday's great for grocery shopping), hit bottom at six, and now has dug it's way up to the other side of the world, resting at nine o'clock(I'll take a taxi, straight to bed). I'm gathering hours like pennies underneath couch cushions; I'm desperate and there are never enough.

Inevitably, no matter what side of the world I'm on, the time comes. A year ago, when the ridiculousness we call our relationship started, I never cried at leaving. That bothered her(at least a little). She wanted me to wipe away my own tears with my shirt sleeve. And that never happened.

Instead, I tried to imbue her with a comfort - this pain is temporary, my love - by repeating it over and over. Looking into her big brown eyes, I tried to reason with the pleading, begging pain behind them. Soon, baby, soon I'll be back. Don't cry, two weeks will be over before you know it. What, it's going to be more than two weeks? Three, three weeks isn't that long either. And to me, for a while, it never was.

Then, the gloom of the bus ride home started to stretch far from it's beginnings at Gate 71 in Port Authority, through the Lincoln tunnel, past the gray and bleak New Jersey landscape, over the Delaware bridge before finally resting with me in my Columbia Heights basement apartment. It faded with a phone call to let her know I was home safe, only to reappear in the emptiness of my bed.

Still, I never cried.

Occasionally, she coaxed out a single tear(an informant let lose from prison, sobbingly spilling his guts), but crying means many tears, or at least two. Otherwise, it doesn't count as crying. I never cried.

Last Monday, I cried. A cloudburst too, not my two-teared bullshit technical definition of crying. You see, I failed to fool myself into thinking my bed wouldn't be empty when I awoke, or that her hand would be under mine during long Subway rides. It's going to be two(or more) weeks before you see her again, you know. A thousand times before I brushed away similar thoughts, but not this time. Two weeks is fine, two weeks make sense. No, it doesn't.

Anyone can go two weeks without seeing a loved one(I'll bet some of you are up for two months, if you're married). I have a habit of visualizing things, problems, and putting them in a vacuum. Inside my thought bubbles the problem floats alone, bordered by vast expanses of blackness. I imagine this is how communists think. There, in a vacuum - free from any temporal considerations - my solution makes sense: two weeks apart isn't a long time, so bear with it.

In real life, spending two weeks apart - over and over for more than a year - wears you down. It tires you out, bursts your bubble, and pushes you bawling like a baby into your girlfriend's lap. It fucking sucks.

I miss her.

So I'm taking little yellow packets of artificial sweetener - that I abhor - and storing them in my right coat pocket. I'm desperate, and I'll never have enough.