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My girlfriend and I are painfully used to long-distance, but it wasn’t always that way… To be clear, two years of our two and a half were entirely over the phone. While I challenge people who say they’d never do long-distance (Not all intimacy is physical!), these two years could be quite rough. It's painful knowing your partner is a long, long, long drive away.

Before these two years, however, we still practiced what my friend Alex succinctly called: “Long Distance at Home.” The mystery of small towns is how close, yet far everything is. You may claim you’re from a town, but live 10, 20, even 30 miles from it. Her and I both claimed the same town, but lived a half hour from it in opposite directions-- different sides of the water.

So, instead of a long, long, long drive, we had just a long, long drive. Frequently I drove it after dark. Sometimes it was back to my house, or to her’s, after work. This drive was, to a naive teenager, life’s greatest challenge. To be in the car is to be vulnerable, especially for an hour in darkness. At first I feared the hour, then I came to dislike it, and, finally, to respect it.

That changed when I drove into a deer leaving a party at her aunt’s place. After that, I went back to fearing it. A long, long, nighttime drive has never been relaxing for me again, no matter where or when. In fact, I avoid driving at night entirely. If I could miss a deer on a dark road, what would stop me from missing another? Or, even worse, a person?

It is with immense gratitude that I tell you my girlfriend has since enrolled in my university, and we are much closer now. Within walking distance, thank god. I’m also happy to report that our deer population is nowhere as high as back home, yet still, when I am forced onto the road, I can never shake the dread, thinking of what might be waiting for me around every corner, behind every bush, a fragile thing waiting to be killed.