2004-03-29 - 7:51 p.m.
After 10 too short days spent back in Portland, Oregon, I returned home to a pile of phone bills and credit card offers nicely stacked on my desk by my housemate Lauren. After sifting through these and carefully tearing out the plastic windows in the envelopes so I could recycle them, I came to a small, blue envelope at the bottom of the pile. “Distance Makes the Heart Grow Fonder 15” was letterpress printed on it. Inside was a little piece of mailable sweetness from my pen-pal Rebecca Ann in Chicago.
It was perfect. And I admit it, after I read it, I started to cry: two lino-cut blue birds printed on a map, which folded out in an accordion fold, with a red interstate line connecting them. “You” and “Me” the birds were labeled. The only other text read “it’s not that far really.” She made the zine for a boy in Bloomington, Indiana, but I could help but think of a certain Hoosier-ex-pat boy I left at the at the PDX airport this morning. Looking out my Brooklyn window to see the planes that look like too bright stars coming in for a landing at Laguardia, I think about the plane I just stepped off hours ago and how it took under 5 hours to traverse all that distance that lies between us now.
