My race report is coming after finals, I promise! This post is not as happy, but you should read it all the same. It’s been in the drafts folder for a bit. Still having the nightmares I write about, by the way.

In the past week, several people have told me they’d like me to write a post about what it’s like being in a (temporarily) transatlantic relationship.

I responded to one of them by saying “it would be too sad”.

Because it is really sad sometimes.

The nights are the worst. After B has long since gone to bed, after all of the day’s distractions are done with, I am alone in the silence of my bedroom. Every creak in the floor is a robber. Every light outside my door is a fire creeping up to my room. My pillows never line up the right way. I’m too cold or too hot and it’s too quiet and it’s all too much and I panic. God bless B for not dumping me when he got the first panicked text at 4 am. And God bless him for not dumping me for all of the panic since then.

Lately it’s been the nightmares. Extremely vivid and creepy nightmares that rocket me awake in the middle of the night.

It gets routine after a while to not see B even through a computer screen. We’re both busy, social people. I still get a twinge when he goes out because I am so disgustingly jealous that other people can be in the same room as my boyfriend. I realize that I am completely ridiculous in this feeling. I also realize that B feels the same sometimes.

I spend a lot of time alone, but also a lot of time with new friends. I’m glad I took on the half marathon battle this semester because it gives me a new way to kill time, but it kills me that B won’t be there to see me complete what I have worked so hard for (and what he has unfailingly encouraged me to do since I began). I offered to have my mom Skype him in on her phone, but he said that would be too painful.

Soon, this time apart will end, and we are lucky to be able to reunite in a few short months. But sometimes every second is a battle.

When I read that North Korea was pointing nuclear weapons at us all I thought about was dying without seeing B again.

I know I’m crazy. You don’t need to tell me.

But these are the things I think about when the silence is too loud.

When B is asleep and no one responds to my panic messages and I see kidnappers at my windows.

We both know that flying home tomorrow is not a possibility, so we persevere on, on to the next Google Voice message, the next Skype call, the next panicked text begging him to tell me he loves me just one more time, the next plane ride to a country that is not our own, and the next part of a journey that will eventually lead to our future.

It’s just the middle of the journey that hurts.