Mind the gap

In July 2022, I saw much of my mother's side of the family for the first time in many years in Baltimore. We were celebrating my cousin, Kit, getting married to her long-time boyfriend. There had been occasional Zoom calls with all of us during the pandemic, but it had never become as frequent as had been proposed and this would be the first time we were all gathering in more than a decade. Though I have known them for all my life, I have never felt close. Three of the cousins around my age live in New York, one lives in LA, one just came back from China and is moving to LA, and the last lives in San Diego. Even to travel to the closest of them from my home in small-town North Carolina would cost hundreds of dollars, so an unspoken rift has grown in our family. It makes me think of how distance itself is all that is necessary to disunite a family and requires a very strong bond to overcome. My mother's side of the family all grew up within the same part of the Northeast (New Jersey and Maryland), went to each other's parties and family events far more often than my sister and I were able to. You could see at this party how natural it was for them to be around each other, like the inside jokes they had with each other and the shared language of living in huge cities. Because I hadn't seen them since we were young teenagers more than a decade ago, it felt like meeting brand new people. In fact, I found I got along more naturally with an older family friend of the groom's than any of my cousins. He was an architect from Switzerland who had lived in several places across Europe, and when I told him that I was trying to move to Germany, he was able to give me advice on what kinds of cultural differences I could expect to face. By the time I boarded my flight back home, I was acutely aware of how I had wasted an opportunity to really get to know my cousins better, as we were all on our way back to settle down into our enclaves scattered around the country. Everyone from either side of my family lives in the US - when I visit them there are no border controls verifying my identity, stamping my passport to mark where I have been and for how long lest I overstay my welcome. But I feel we lead very different lives, because with their urban upbringing in the Northeast they live much faster, more exotic lives than I did in the comparatively rural South. There are reference points in our lives which separate us into different spheres of life and frameworks of understanding ourselves, and because we live so far apart, we may never be able to bridge those divides.

Jack, 27.