The Distance Was Never Meant to Be This Wide

We used to live close.
Same town. Same porch.
Die in the house you were born in.

Mom and Dad had 11 kids because six wouldn’t make it.
Because grief was cheaper than labor.
Because someone had to milk the cow when the fever took hold.

You married the girl from church.
She married you because that’s what was there.
Love, if you were lucky.
Endurance, if you weren’t.

That was life.

Then came the roads.
Then the cities.
Then Wi-Fi.

Now we leave.
Move three states away.
Or three countries.
Start over. Reinvent. Disappear like the dead used to do, only without the closure.

But our nervous systems?

They’re still sitting by the fire,
waiting for the familiar knock on the door,
the smell of bread from the same kitchen,
the ache of proximity — the only kind of love that mattered for most of human history.

We haven’t caught up.
We won’t.
You can code your soul into a thousand posts and it still won’t feel like family.

We used to live out loud.
Now we live in pixels.
These words?
Just ones and zeroes on some humming server farm, probably cooled by glacier runoff.

During the pandemic, I traced my blood back.
Followed the vein from Missouri to Germany to Ireland to nothing.
And I saw the same thing over and over again:

Running.

From plague.
From famine.
From kings and bombs and empty bellies.
From churches. From tyrants. From each other.

They moved.
And the problems followed.
They always do.

Eventually, they got here.
America.
Started farms. Found God.
Chased Him west like He owed them something.

And when they hit the ocean,
when there was nowhere else to run,
they didn’t stop.

They made somewhere new.
They invented the internet.

And the famine?
It logged in.

And the tyranny?
It opened a Patreon.

And the tragedy?
It went viral.

That’s the new village.
That’s the new church.
That’s the new home.

And no one knows your name there.

Only your handle.