That is what she said: “Let’s keep doing what we do.” I liked the sentiment, even coming from someone thousands of miles away.
A correspondence with a woman in France, initiated via one of those penpal websites I might have mentioned a few weeks ago, seems to have gained real traction, or whatever the appropriate word would be. She seems endlessly interesting, though I reserve the right to maintain a little bit of Internet-buffered skepticism. I only know her first name, which is a reasonable safeguard to take when meeting people this way. As the conversations continued she revealed bit by bit her details. A Canadian ex-pat born in a tiny fishing village in the north of the country she later moved to Vancouver. Now she is living in a small town in France where she teaches languages to people of all ages. From that I assumed, not unreasonably, that she was white, since any Canadian I’ve ever known was that. But she is Japanese. To have been Japanese living in that part of Canada made her and her family quite singular, she says.
In our talks she moves from English to French with ease, which I find magical. But I think our fundamental connection is the walking. Just after I had said here that walking has become like religion for me I find this person in France who feels the same. She goes for hours-long walks whenever possible, and much prefers to do this alone rather than with another person, as do I. I don’t think she said this outright but I take away from her comments the implication that you miss so much in these step-by-step travels when you are obligated to converse and be available for another person. I might have thought of it that way but I don’t know if I articulated it. We have a little thing going where we walk and talk to each other, dictating text into e-mails. It’s fun having someone to talk to like that, though both of our routines include spending a good portion of these walks in silence.
She has two kids from a failed marriage that she’s not yet ready to talk about. She says she is happy to hear about my past relationships. That’s a sign of a healthy mind. I don’t know that I need to go into that stuff at this point but she adds the further wisdom that the mistakes made or the bad experiences are what you learn from. To me the act of opening up to your partner about who you’ve been with and what went right or wrong is a fundamental building block of a life together. We don’t exactly have that yet (a life together), and the chances of things evolving in that direction are way up in the air, even higher than the clouds.
I can’t lie, though, the prospect of moving far away to be with somebody is not entirely out of the question for me. Even if things did not work out it’s been in my mind for years that there is a lot of the world I have not seen and that has not seen me. I know people who’ve relocated for the sake of a relationship where things worked out. But I also know of people who gave up their lives in one place to be with someone far away only to find the ardor had faded before they even arrived. One person I know moved to Australia to spend the rest of his life with someone he met here in Astoria. Through as much insight as one can accurately glean from Facebook postings that seems to have worked out. I know someone else, though, who moved from a large city to a small town in a flyover state only to find the woman he moved there to be with would not even talk to him. I’ve also known people who basically decided to get married before ever even meeting in person, but I cannot ever forget the time I’ve wasted with women who seemed to be leading up to something serious when we met in person only to let me go without a word, without us ever being together. I don’t want to made to look like that kind of an asshole ever again.
But that kind of thinking is getting way ahead of things. We both used the word “excited” to describe how we feel about the correspondence. That’s about right. Onward, then, with doing what we do.
