639 miles from St. Louis and 455 miles from Memphis. I am lucky if I go to Missouri every other year for Thanksgiving. The same goes for visiting Tennessee at Christmas time. With the physical distance between my extended family and I it is easy to also create distance between us emotionally. Eventually you don't even recognize your aunts, your uncles, and even your cousins. You can call your grandparents every week or so, but it can't even begin to compare to seeing them in person. But when you are a broke college student who has to worry about paying rent and taking midterms, how can you?
You finally get some time to visit them at a holiday and you feel weird, like an outsider looking in. Everyone is a year or two, or even three older and you spend the one day you have with them trying to cram your whole year into a little less than 24 hours. You look at your cousins, aunts, and uncles and you don't even recognize them. Your once little cousins are now taller than you and your aunt and uncles discuss their children's latest achievements and you wonder if you can even compare. You sit at the dinner table and try to think of something, anything to speak about with the rest of the clan. But after spending so much time apart from each other, what do you even have in common? In my case, I just sit and pray that someone, anyone says something that you can relate to.
Although all your time together may be awkward and uncomfortable you 24 hours is over before you know it and everyone is packing up their cars to head back to their respective states. You are suddenly overcome with this feeling of unbelievable guilt and nostalgia about holidays past. You think of all the times you had with your family opening presents, going bowling, watching movies, taking family portraits, and laughing about dropped cupcakes. You want to go back to those times, when talking was a force of habit and awkward silences were two made up words. But alas, you are now stuck as an adult who can't communicate with her on family because the miles between you all have caused you to drift apart; and you can't help but think of what could have become of our relationship if we were all still near to each other. Would we talk more? Would we get together more than once every other year? I guess we will never know.
Even if those thoughts that constantly run through your mind are screaming at you to remember how weird it is to be around them, you can't help but miss them every day. Even if you call or text them once every other week or so, you still wish you could actually see them, hug them, talk to them without the use of technology. Because after all, they are your family. And you can't help but love them more than anything. No matter if their jokes are terrible, you don't understand the people they talk about in their conversations or if their recent accomplishments make you feel small, you still love them. And you will miss them every day that you are separated from them.
