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Shikha Sharma
It happened at a party last December.
Not a bad party. A good party, actually. People we both knew, a house we liked, food that was better than party food usually is. My husband was across the room talking to someone and I was talking to someone and we had both been talking to our respective someones for about forty minutes and the party was going well.
And then I felt it.
The specific feeling of being in a room with the person you love and feeling, for no reason you can immediately identify, slightly far away from them. Not estranged. Not unhappy. Just aware of a distance between you that the room has created and that you would like to close but cannot close because you are both in the middle of conversations and the closing would require interrupting things.
I watched him across the room. He was talking with the ease he has with people he knows well. He was laughing at something. He looked comfortable. He was not far away from me. I was far away from him.
The distinction matters. The distance was mine. He did not feel it. I felt it.
I mentioned it to him in the car on the way home. We were driving back, late, and I said I had felt a bit far from you tonight at some point. He said when. I said around the forty-minute mark when we were both in different conversations. He said he had not felt it. I said I knew. He said was everything okay. I said yes, it was fine, it was just a feeling.
We had Sunfeast Marie Light in the car because I always have something in my bag for late events, and I ate one and he drove and I thought about the feeling and what it meant.
I have been thinking about it since.
What the Feeling Is
The feeling is not jealousy. I want to be specific about this because jealousy is the closest word available and it is not the right word.
Jealousy implies that something is being given to someone else that should be given to you. That is not what this is. He was talking to friends. The talking to friends was fine. I was glad he was talking to friends. The feeling was not about the friends.
The feeling is closer to something like: I can see you but I cannot reach you right now and the cannot-reach-you is more present than usual because we are in the same room and the cannot-reach-you should not apply in the same room.
It is the feeling of being aware of the gap between two people who do not usually have a gap. The gap is not permanent. The gap is circumstantial. The gap is a Tuesday-evening party gap that will close the moment you get in the car. But while the party is happening and the gap is present, you feel it.
My friend Priya described the same feeling at a wedding last year. She was seated at a different table from her husband for the dinner portion. He was across the room. She could see him. He was fine. She was fine. Everything was fine. And she sat through the dinner with a quiet awareness of the across-the-room of it that she said she found mildly surprising because they had been together for six years and she had not expected to mind the dinner seating.
She said she minded it.
The Crowd Specifically
The crowd is part of why the feeling happens.
At home, the distance between two rooms is nothing. He is in the other room. The other room is part of the same space and the same space contains both of you. The distance is physical but not felt.
At a party, the distance between two sides of a room is different. The crowd fills the space between you. The crowd is full of other people having other conversations and you have to navigate through all of them to get to him and the navigation feels like more effort than it should in a room this small.
The crowd also means you cannot communicate across it easily. At home you can call out. At a party you would have to raise your voice or physically cross the room and both of those feel like larger moves than the situation requires. So you stay where you are. You are across the room. The crowd is between you. You feel the distance.
My friend Meera says she and her husband have a system for parties. They check in every thirty minutes. Not because anything is wrong. Because they have both noticed that thirty minutes is approximately how long the party gap takes to become noticeable. The check-in is just a brief moment of being near each other again before returning to separate conversations.
She said the system removes the loneliness. Not the distance. Just the loneliness. The distance is still there. But you know the check-in is coming and the check-in resets the distance back to zero.
What It Means
I have thought about what the feeling means and I think it means something simple.
It means I still want to be near him. After six years of being near him, in the same flat, in the same bed, across the same kitchen table, I still notice when I am not near him and I still feel the absence.
The party gap is uncomfortable because the default is not a party gap. The default is close. The default is the kitchen table and the couch and the car on the way home. The party gap is an interruption to the default and the interruption is noticeable precisely because the default is so established.
The feeling is not a sign that something is wrong. It is a sign that something is right. You do not feel the absence of something unless its presence is the normal state.
His presence is my normal state. The party interrupted my normal state for forty minutes.
He drove home. I ate a biscuit. We talked about the party.
The distance closed before we left the car park.
It always does.
