Eleven — The Gap Has a Geography

Eleven — The Gap Has a Geography

I want to describe the gap physically, since it was always physical before it was anything else.

It was the distance between our chairs at the dinner table, which was approximately four feet of wood and air and which might as well have been a field. It was the distance between the kitchen doorway where I would stand watching him read the newspaper and the chair where he sat reading it, a distance of perhaps eight feet that I crossed almost never, because crossing it required an opening that was not usually available and because the crossing, when I attempted it, typically resulted in an exchange that made the eight feet feel, on the return journey, considerably longer.

It was the distance between his hand and my head on the Sunday afternoon when he came into my room — a distance that was briefly, for less than a second, zero, and which snapped back immediately to something much larger when the hand withdrew.

It was the distance between his face when I showed him something and the face I needed him to have in response to it. This distance was not physical but it was real, and it was, in terms of what it cost me to cross it, the largest distance in the geography.

Geographies shape the people who live in them. A person raised in mountains thinks differently from a person raised on plains. The habits of navigation that the terrain requires become the habits of the person — not consciously, not deliberately, but through the daily requirement of moving through the specific world that was given to them rather than the world they might have chosen.

My terrain was the gap. I learned to navigate it. I became very good at navigating distances, at reading the terrain, at identifying the moments when crossing was possible and the moments when it was not, at calibrating the energy required against the probability of return. These are real skills. I use them in ways that have nothing to do with my father. The skills are mine now.

The terrain is also mine now. The gap does not close when the father is not present to stand on the other side of it. The gap travels. You bring it with you. You find yourself standing on one side of it in contexts where it should not exist and wondering how it arrived there before you did.

The gap is mine. I did not choose it. I am learning what to do with it.