Between Kisses

I pull the car up the departure door, pop the trunk, pull out Cindy’s suitcase and give her a long kiss goodbye. In seconds she is swallowed by the cavernous airport and I’m back in the car heading home, missing her already.

It hasn’t always been like that.  For years in the 90’s we lived apart more than we lived together, and before that I was often gone for long periods of time, but we managed.  In the 80’s when I was traveling in Asia, there was no internet or email and phone calls were simply too expensive and hard to arrange given the time zone difference.  We relied on faxes!  Do you remember faxes? I can remember sleeping in some hotel or another in Tokyo or Hong Kong when I would hear a slight sigh of an envelope being slipped under my door.  I would leap out of bed and read the fax from Cindy; in fact I would read it several times before going back to sleep. It was a tough way to stay in touch.

Now we have multiple ways to say in touch, in fact if we wanted we could be in touch all of the time.  The technology however does not solve the problem. We adjusted in the early days because we had to adjust. Cindy had her job, I had mine and we simply dealt with it as best we could.  Now, however, we are both retired and spend most waking hours together. Mostly doing mundane things, but we are together and can communicate without a word or with lots of words, but we are in constant communication. 

When she leaves now I do not find calls, messages, email, or even FaceTime to be a very satisfying way to communicate. It is stilted, usually short, sometimes just an emoji or single letter, K for okay.  And so, paradoxically, I miss her more now when we have tons of tech to work with than I did in the early years. And so I wait with great anticipation for the welcome home kiss, to end the loneliness.