I am in Ottawa this week.
I have forgotten how beautiful this Canadian city truly is. The weather has been a walking one, and it has invited me during breaks in my meetings and early in the mornings to let the cool air drift over my face. Before the rain decided to join the playground yesterday, the sun had played shadow puppets against the façade of the Victorian style architecture of the Parliament building and the Chateau Laurier. It tickled the waters of the long Rideau Canal that runs through the central part of the city. In the winter, many come to ice skate the along the frozen water way. I had done so over a decade ago, when I had experienced my first winter in Canada as a student in the nearby city of Montreal. As I strolled along Elgin Street, my right hand opened and closed by my thigh. I was imagining that I was holding hands with my little boy, Sebastian, whom I have missed exceedingly.
While I have traveled for my job for over a decade, it has become increasingly difficult to be away from my family. One would assume that I would finally have an opportunity to sleep uninterrupted through the night. However, I find myself waking intermittently and clutching my pillow. I miss the smell of Sebastian’s baby powder scented skin and my husband’s aftershave. I miss how they both jump on me when I am reading in bed. I miss the three of us cuddling together on the worn brown, leather sofa and eating Milano cookies before bedtime. I am lonely in my hotel room.
Every night, to ease the ache of being alone, I call my family twice. I can see them through a video chat on the internet. We first see each other at 6pm just as my husband and son have come home and I have finished a day of meetings. All of us are excited to see one another.
The other night, most of the conversation consisted of us making silly faces through the web cam, sending my son into interminable fits of giggles. They repositioned the camera several times so that I could see what they were eating. It was leftover pizza night. The casserole I had made before I left had remained uneaten on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. A few hours later, we said goodnight through the video chat again. Sebastian was wearing his glow-in-the-dark pajamas. His wet hair was combed over to one side. He leaned into the computer and placed his hand on the screen, as if to touch my face.
“Mommy, you at work?”
“Yes, I still am here in Canada for work. But I really miss you and your dada, Sebastian.”
“You’re bee-ti-ful. So pretty.”
“Thank you my Sebi. My little baby.”
“No, mommy, I SeBAStian. I not a baby. I a little boy.”
Skerdi and I look at each other through the screen. Our little boy says his name with a slight hint of a British accent. SeBAStian. SeBAStian. I love mimicking the way he says it – like Colin Firth when he enunciates that he is “Mr. DARcy” from the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. My husband told me once that he had learned the Queen’s English back in Albania. He used to say things with a slight accent as well.
“I go sleep now, Mommy,” Sebastian continues. “Daddy read me book, [I] Love You Stinky Face.”
Sebastian squirmed out of my husband’s lap and tugs on his shirt’s sleeve. “Come on Daddy!”
My husband lingers on the screen and reassures me before I even get a chance to ask. “He’s already had a bath and brushed his teeth.”
“I miss you guys.”
Skerdi smiled, as if he was virtually patting my head. “I miss you a lot, too, Honey. But you’ll be here soon to see us all again. This is a short trip for you.”
“Four days seems so long.” From the bedroom, my son calls out to his dad once more. “You better go to the Ali Pasha.”
“I know. I know. SeBAStian needs me. But just remember, you and I were apart for months, and we didn’t even have all this” He pointed right at me, at the computer. “ I love you. I’ll see you soon.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow. Same time, same screen. Text if you need something.”
The Dark Ages
My husband and I spent the early years of relationship—our courtship—away from each other. Although we met here in the United States, through a workshop, the conditions of his J-1 visa prevented him not only from staying but also from returning back for at least two years. Skerdi left me at the airport with a promise that one day we would be together. It was 1999.
Back then, we were infants not only in our relationship, but in our careers. We had no money, nor did we have opportunities to see each other. It was a tough decision: Would we follow love or would we build our careers? Why couldn’t we have both, we wondered.
Skerdi and I faced this question and many hurdles with the optimism of idealistic twenty-five year olds. We kept at bay the doubts that our more pragmatic side—and also those voiced by friends and family—had. Would a long-distance relationship work? Could promises and dreams sustain us through four or five months without being near each other? The statistics were against us.
Proximity has always been touted as integral to the success of a relationship. In addition, we had the disadvantage of being from two very different cultures. While Skerdi spoke English, language was still an issue. There were missed nuances and misunderstood humor. And in between, we imagined all sorts of misdeeds.
The biggest of the hurdles that he and I faced was communication. In the beginning, Skerdi’s home—like many in Albania at that time—had neither telephone nor easy access to a computer. In Albania, many of the computer stations only had dial-up access. Moreover, neither one of us had a cell phone back in 1999. Long-distance calls were expensive–$1 per minute. We understood the situation, but we also knew that if were to survive between the long months apart, we needed to share our feelings, our thoughts and our ideas.
Droples of Candlewax on Paper
In the first few months, every weekend, Skerdi would go to the main office at the University of Vlora, where he was a lecturer. I bought phone cards, and we would talk for more than three hours about what we had done during the week. We often sent each other faxed messages with nothing more than “I’m thinking of you today.”
Often, an email would pop into my inbox. Those missives were always short. He was taking advantage of the connection and what little money he had to spend at the Internet café.
In our time apart, we also wrote letters. In a memory box kept in the shadows of my closet, where I keep the pictures from our wedding and memorabilia from our trips together, there are pages and pages of hand-written notes from Skerdi. He wrote of love, plans, dreams and troubles.
“There was nothing else to do but to write letters to you,” Skerdi had said.
In one correspondence, he wrote about how Albania had been suffering an energy crisis. The country experienced long stretches of power outages and water shortages. Skerdi wrote about the darkness and how the city was still and lifeless. He could not walk for he could not trust the moon to illuminate his path. So he lay on his bed and wondered what I was doing. I remember that letter well. He called me his little kinesa doll, Chinese doll. I read the letter hundreds of times and tucked it into the pocket of my purse so I could peruse it during breaks at work. I presed my palm upon the lined green sheet of paper and felt the raised droplets of candle wax and saw the slight charring in the middle of the paper . I imagined him holding the flame above the sheet to see what he had written before he stuffed it in an envelope. It took several Albanian stamps to mail the letter to me.
There were many love notes like the one above. Many were written by the flame of a single candle, in the darkness; he wondered constantly about me. Did I get my visa from the embassy? Did I get my paper tickets for my trip? Was I excited to see him?
During one of my trips to Albania, there was a power outage. Skerdi and I sat in the dark, in the dining room, eating dinner by the light a single candle. His mother brought out a box containing all the letters and photos I had sent to him. Several years later, these were the same images that she and my father-in-law had shown to the consular officer who, believing wholly in our romance, had granted them their first visa to the United States. “It’s amazing you wrote letters to each other.
Technology and True Love
Five years ago, Skerdi and I wed on Columbus Day Monday, on the veranda of the Meadowlark Garden’s glass atrium. At high noon, the sun shone overhead, as a lone white butterfly danced around us. The winds crooned its love songs through the whispers of reds and browns of the woodlands beyond. Guests waved wands with bells and red ribbons; while bridesmaids—clad in scarlet, crimson, vermilion and rose—secured the dahlia boutonnieres onto the lapels of the groomsmen. It was a celebration of the joys and the challenges that Skerdi and I had faced. It was also an avowal of commitment, for we pledged—in English and in Albanian—to enjoy the road ahead of us with an abundance of love, respect and fun. It was 10.10.05.
While Skerdi and I were cutting the cake, I thought about the long road behind us and why we survived.
It’s hard to dispense advice on relationships, when we’ve only been together for such a short time. All we know is that in the face of statistics and of weighty challenges, we came out winning. The best thing about being in a long-distance relationship is that we both did work on building a career and on our relationship. When you have so little opportunity to be together or talk on the phone, you make the minutes count. You learn to communicate. You learn to disagree. You learn not to take any words or actions or each other for granted.
When Skerdi moved to the United States in 2002, the first thing we did together was get cell phones. Every day, we talk to each other at least six or seven times while we are at work. We poke each other over emails, text or Facebook. When I travel, we remain connected via video chats, Skype, and emails. Although technology has advanced true love, Skerdi and I are proud that we did not necessarily need it to survive the distance. We had faith in each other.
10.10.10
Since our wedding, I had been excited about my five year anniversary. It fell on Sunday, last weekend, on 10.10.10. For a long time, I chanted those numbers and felt the energy encased within the binary series. At heart, I was a geek. And like all the other geeks—as well as numerologists—worldwide, the symbolic day of October 10, 2010, was to be celebrated.
How? I wanted a grand affaire. I concocted an appropriate, and clever, theme: “Bits and Bytes.” I wanted an outlandish cocktail party, for which invitees had to respond by ticking off a “1” for yes and “0” for no on the invitation I was itching to design. I wanted a 5-tier cake that was actually made of smaller pieces—nano-cakes I called them—with a pattern of 1’s and 0’s stenciled on the fondant. I envisioned servers passing platters of canapés and glasses of cabernet.
Sunday passed. There was no fanfare—no wittily executed plans around creative ways of incorporating binary code. Moreover there was no renewal of vows. There was no assertion of undying passion and feverish commitment.
Instead, there was a simple declaration of love.
On the eve of our anniversary, Skerdi and I shared a five-course meal at a steakhouse. There was something more powerful, more poignant in the quiet of our celebration. For five years, I had wanted to share our day with others, and at the last moment, it was about us.
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