For the last several weeks, I’ve been changing up my morning workout routine to incorporate Bikram yoga every Thursday. Class begins at 6:15am, which means I need to wake up by 5:45 to get out the door at 6 to walk over to the yoga studio. Today, though, class started at 6, so I figured waking up just fifteen minutes earlier at 5:30am wouldn’t be a huge difference for me.

I was wrong. At about 2pm today, I started crashing pretty hard, and I almost wanted to pass out over my computer.

I started this morning workout routine back in April of this year. As I was trying to fight my drowsiness at work, I thought about how I never told Ed that I started this workout routine. I never told him I was determined to get in shape again. In fact, because I was so concerned about how he was doing and ways he could better his life, I realize that in the last few months before he left us, when we’d talk on the phone, I barely told him anything that I was up to. I did tell him I was looking for a new job, and that was really it.

It hurts to know that he didn’t know these things about me. Maybe he would have wanted to know, or maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe if he knew I was driven to do certain things, then maybe he would have felt more driven to live. Or maybe I am just making that up right now because I wish that could have been the case. Despite our closeness and love for one another, there will always be things that we did not know about each other that were important to us. I suppose that’s the way relationships are – you can’t always share everything. But like a quote I once read from Rainier Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which suddenly came to me just now, “infinite distances” exist among the closest of people:

“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people, infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole, and before an immense sky.”

A distance that feels like infinity now exists between us. But one day, when we are together again, I will learn again to love the expanse between us.