Member-only story
The Gravity of Empty Spaces
Chasing closure around the globe without ever leaving home.
There are countries I orbit around, but only in name. It’s funny how I feel the weight of places I have yet to see. I am a stranger to their architecture outside of a pictorial plane or the tastes of their local cuisine. I have not smelt the air or watched the sky age from a different axis. Instead, my memory exists in people and throwaway facts, like a scavenger finding understandings from the side of a road with no real destination. These recollections hang about as the debris of a true experience, framed in a cosmopolitan patchwork. Yet, in all the ways they remain, I am suspended in the gravity of their empty space.
The most palpable distances are not always physical. I had an ex who went to Italy when work took him and his bandmates abroad. Through sporadic texts, he summarized Rome as the background to his friends’ misadventures. They purchased ties on a whim from a passing store and posed as tourists do. He sent photos of the Trevi Fountain. The highlight of his retelling was nighttime meandering, during which his friends departed from their main group to wander the city streets. When he returned from his trip, he gifted me a glass turtle; its twin was a present for his grandmother.
