10, 543.414 miles door-to-door

10, 543.414 miles door-to-door, as the crow flies.

21 months ago I moved.

I have exchanged seasons and flipped diurnal rhythms, traded in a hemisphere dominated by land for the liquid heavy one.

Ten-thousand-five-hundred-and-forty-three-miles-four-hundred-and-fourteen-feet is the exact distance (as the crow flies) from my new front door to the house I grew up in.

And now daybreak is twilight and leaves die off as flowers bloom.

And once again the see-saw has swung so as my old home opens up, my new one locks down.

Since March 2020 time has taken on a new dimension, moving beyond the sweeping of hands over hours, the unspooling of seasons, and the disintegration of humanity one being at a time, to the unknowables of a pandemic.

I am severed from blood, but I ache for my water-born family. Before I moved, somebody took me by the shoulders and said remember to grieve this move, remember to grieve the loss of being close to your family. I laughed, and told them I had nothing to grieve.

They forgot to say the family you have chosen.

We crumble the land and siphon off the seas for the necessity of speed. For the ease of dancing along equators, traversing poles, and defining the tilt of our own axis. The ends of the earth have moved beyond my grasp.

I cannot fly as the crow does. I cannot go beyond 3.01 miles. And once the week has passed I do not know if I can go beyond state lines. But I do know that

I cannot cross the threshold of a country that’s a continent that’s an island.