Poema De La Distancia Novels & Stories

I closed my eyes, picturing Don Antonio's face, the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled, the sound of his voice, deep and resonant. "He's a part of me, Sarah," I whispered, my voice thick with emotion. "And no matter how far away he is, no matter what anyone says, that part of me is still connected to him. It always will be." The distance between us, instead of diminishing my feelings, seemed to amplify them, to sharpen the edges of my yearning. Every memory, every shared moment, was magnified, intensified, becoming a burning ember in the hollow space he had left behind.

The bond pulsed stronger than before, Not a whisper now but a door. A door she hadn’t meant to open. A path she swore would stay unspoken. Her fingers curled along the glass, Watching silent moments pass. “No,” she whispered, voice gone tight, “I will not let this pull rewrite.” Because distance had been her shield, The only truth she would not yield. But something in her chest replied A force she could not cast aside.

Ernest said. Don looked at him. "Portugal," he said. He had not written about Portugal. Portugal predated the pieces, had been the trip before the writing had begun, the trip that had planted the seed for everything that came after. "Portugal would require going back," he said. "I would need to write it from five years' distance." "Which is also a form of the argument," Ernest said. "The distance is how you see the specific qualities." Don looked at him. The expression again — the finding of something he had been looking for.

The space between us felt charged, familiar, like something my body had memorized. “I tried to stay away,” I admitted quietly. “And?” he asked. “I hated it.” His gaze darkened—not with triumph, but with something closer to understanding. “Distance shows us what we’re attached to,” he said. “I don’t like what it showed me,” I whispered. He stepped closer, close enough that I could feel the heat of him without contact. “You don’t hate the distance,” he said calmly. “You hate what it reveals.” I looked up at him, my chest tight.

She read the poem again, this time with distance: --- **My touch no longer raised goosebumps. My presence went unnoticed. I stopped existing in his world, yet he still lived in mine. I shook him harder, hoping he’d remember me, remember what he felt the first time, even if just once. Maybe he’d turn around and say he was sorry, say he never meant to hurt me. I screamed his name louder and louder, each cry falling on deaf ears. No movement. No response. Only silence. I stared at the man I would’ve burned bridges for,

Like if either of us moved even slightly— Everything would shift again. But then— I stepped out. Breaking it. Creating distance. Even if it didn’t feel real. Even if it didn’t feel enough. Because the truth was— Distance wasn’t the problem anymore. And it definitely wasn’t the solution.

The doubt was already smaller now but it was not entirely gone. "I keep waiting for the moment I stop being afraid of him," I said. Elena looked at me steadily. "That moment does not arrive before the work is done," she said. "It arrives after. I know because I waited for it for years and it only came when there was enough distance between me and your father that his reach could not find me anymore." She reached across the table and put one hand over mine. "You are building the distance. That is the work. The fear shrinks as the distance grows."

That evening, as the sun dipped low over the vineyard, I stood on the terrace again, watching the sky soften into gold and amber. Beautiful. Quiet. Peaceful. Everything I should have wanted. And yet— My chest tightened, because peace felt…incomplete; Like something or someone essential was missing. I exhaled slowly, pressing my fingers against the cool stone of the railing. “I thought this would be enough,” I murmured to myself. It wasn’t. Because the truth was simple. Distance didn’t weaken what I felt for him. It revealed it. And now— There was no pretending otherwise. I tried really hard to distract myself, but the heavy feeling in my heart remained, I talked to my father's worker's, I we

The specific and particular and factual measurement of the distance between her face and mine in the moment of her turning, the two inches that existed in the real and concrete world of the terrace, not a feeling, not a metaphor, a distance with a specific and actual quality, a distance that was different from every other distance I maintained with her in every other context, the professional context and the dinner table context and the hallway context and the kitchen-in-the-morning context, all of which I managed with the particular and careful awareness of a man who understood the specific and important line between what he was doing and what he was not doing. This was not that distance. S

He was looking at her with that careful expression, the one he got when he was about to ask something he’d been sitting with for a while. “What do you mean?” she asked. “I just—” he stopped. Searched for it. “Sometimes this visit you’ve seemed far away. Not always. Not even most of the time. But sometimes I’d be talking and I’d look at you and you were—” he gestured vaguely, “—somewhere else.” The candlelight moved between them. She held his gaze. “Long distance does strange things,” she said carefully. “It takes time to be properly present again. To not be waiting for the call to end or the visit to finish.”