CLOSE BUT FAR
Wes Foster
stillness is inescapeable. streets no longer move, the air is empty as i pass through it. walking through the city, nothing moves. roads are quiet. this is another. you used to be within touching distance, hidden behind the bedsheets napping the days away. pale skin and long dark hair wrapped, soft to the touch.
touching distance became shadows apart. in normal circumstances a train journey, now though, the fallacy of touch is far away. in normal circumstances, it would be easy. togetherness and closeness go hand in hand.
short walks and trips to the shop describe everything i am now. i pass through the same spaces that i always have, yet they seem different. they carry the weight of the new normal. distance is implicit, distance is advertised. this new normal without touch.
without, it has become virtual. implicit is that lack of feeling. there is only so much that you can show through a screen. even if you pretend you have a kink for it. that distance is still there, nothing can replace.
divisional, or divisive, it doesn’t matter. there are still those that will wander. they will always wander. boredom trumps all. who will consume if not the consumer?
mostly it passes. they can browse, make demands. despite, i cannot look back at you. through this haze of strangeness, i cannot really see. it clouds.
the taste of you is far away now. to be close is alien. removed from our new reality. this newness is subdued and far away, hardly conscious. concentrated on working to consume, awy from relation or intimacy.
all our old routines, not that we had even borne any together yet, shattered. the twenty minute waiting time that i never understood now seems so precious. the mundane is missed the most, those moments of usual.
to see one another means one could shatter. social norms dictate we cannot, despite the closeness of distance we must remain distant. a strange refrain of form.
the difficulty is in the not knowing, not the loss. to be far away is nothing we’re not used to. there is no way to make a date, no way to predict a future. things require momentum. to sit idle is the strangest, to have to chose inaction is alien.