It’s All About Distance. Letters for the Future

We live in imaginary countries
– Etel Adnan

To the reader
November 2025.
Upon reading my words from 2022, I wonder what remains of those fragile images. I had written them as love letters to comrades, lovers, and friends, some of whom are still part of my life today, and others who have left their mark despite the distance. Today, I return to the affective distance I have with my own words in an attempt to reckon with them. I wrote to Dana and Abed after a long stay in the West Bank in 2022. I have the chance to call them friends and comrades while remaining cognizant of the different proximity, spatial and temporal, to the reality of occupation and colonisation. I first met Abed in 2017 and he introduced me to Dana in 2022. Throughout our relationship, we reflected on physical and affective distance. I wrote to Teo, a friend based in Milan, after a conversation that echoed these reflections, and it is this resonance that prompted the assembling of these fragments.

To the reader
December 2022.
Sometimes I write because I feel that nothing around me can change, that everything is doomed. It’s like a need. I write letters to feel less alone, to communicate on a multidimensional level so that my words on the laptop can reach the distant bodies and minds of those I love. I write because I need to feel and experience differently, to imagine something else for us. I write because I need to believe in the future, in the worlds that we can build together. Moving beyond the here and now – the impasse that ties us to the present – I crave otherwise: the love and care that we deserve.

To Dana
August 2022, Ramallah.
The first time we met in person, I had just come back from Al Khalil, after a visit to the Union of Agricultural Work Committees.1 With Abed, we spent three restless and sleepless days and nights, wandering in the city or in your apartment. The night before I arrived, the bombing on Gaza had just ended; the IOF had entered Ramallah and attacked several NGOs – they smashed doors, confiscated computers, sealed entrances with iron plates, and threw tear gas and rubber bullets. In Ramallah, we could breathe the vast dimension and scale of the oppression – I could breathe it through you in a collapsing reality that left no space for affect. It wasn’t just about the present conditions, but the threatening absence of alternatives to them. All of a sudden, the three of us were bonding and loving each other, as if to know that we were not alone, that our love could generate something else – alternative futures and presents. Loving each other meant being together through music and poetry, through dance and touching skins, through our political visions and long conversations about distance – not as separation, but as a way of shaping intimacy, of building affect across broken geographies.

To the reader
December 2022.
Writing letters is about distance. The physical distance between you and me, the borders and boundaries between my body and yours, the different conditions of existence between living under occupation and leaving occupation. It’s all about distance. Maybe through distance we can watch each other, read each other, try to see each other for real. Maybe through distance we can write, listen, and exchange fragments of poems, building a kind of intimacy that can only exist in echoes, gestures, and the rhythm of waiting. And maybe touching through distance means imagining the skin of each other’s bodies, feeling a warmth that cannot be reached, but that can still be sensed.

To Teo
September 2022, Milan.
Where are we going on this night of early September, while our world feels so desolate and closed in on itself? “Like a dream in the night / Who can say where we’re going?” A song by Roxy Music accompanies our sleepwalking wander through the city. I like watching you walk in the dark, looking for a place to stop, a place where we don’t belong. Our souls may have known each other for an eternity; as they touch, they caress each other gently, vibrating. But our bodies only have recently met – still awkward, they seek each other in the darkness and savour the unexpected joy of first contact. A red light, a DJ console, your smile. I don’t know how I ended up in this basement with you. We laugh endlessly. I hug you dancing. In my memory, there are no longer events, episodes, stories, but glimpses of something that had happened and now, as we dance and talk, I only see your smile. Maybe we met for the first time tonight. It’s all so fragmented, fragile, vulnerable. Unable to bear the constant flow around it, so chaotic and overcrowded with experiences, my mind clings to the sensations of the moment. And then we kiss and touch in that basement, while out there everything seems too complex, too articulated for our spirits, too encroached by expectations, illusions, and disappointments. I am haunted by restless dreams during waking times. Shortness of breath, tachycardia, and tears on the edge of the eyelids, because I don’t function; I am at odds with the people around me. I don’t want to live as a functional tool that repeats consolidated norms in space and time. This is why I look at you tonight and I think that there is nothing more beautiful than what we could create now – something that doesn’t work. Something that has no aim. Not a single utility.

To the reader
December 2022.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes, “And all my love to you who preserve the mysteries. Whom the empire of binaries will never define. All of you who love with a depth beyond recognition, nurturing freedom over understandability, valuing life as so much more important than simple comprehension. Thank you. Thank you for loving me without even knowing what on Earth I am.”

To Abed
August 2022, Ramallah.
I don’t know why your voice sounds like home. We met through common friends I had been visiting in Ramallah, and since then, you have been a welcome haunting in my memory. I used to sleep on your couch, and now, years later, we are reunited like kin again. Yet, even now, even with me and Dana, you seem distant, like a solitary comet that releases parts of itself then takes off into the vast universe. I think that what you share with us is wordless. You often speak about the limits of words – the boundaries that words can create. It is true that words can be used to distance oneself from others, to create a barrier between the self and the world. And yet, every time words hit you, you run away from them: your eyes become distant, your silence heavy. Sometimes words make that barrier collapse. In these moments, your beauty is so powerful that it can be like danger: fragile, like a dry flower between the pages of a notebook that the world can easily break, ruin, and kill. So you take care of and shield your beauty. It is just a tiny fissure within your body, but it’s enough to see an entire new world, the instant of possibility of a new kind of relationship on this wounded and occupied land.

To me
April/May 2023, on a train.
I can feel the distance from myself. Today, as spring bursts, I skim through the words and feelings that animated these letters. It’s all about distance, once again. These fragments belong to a past I crave to return to – a past that haunts my present. More poetry and less loneliness. Today, it is about the distance my body keeps from this world: between power and death, between pain and pleasure, between the effort and discomfort of transformation.

To Dana
August 2022, Ramallah.
In the days we spent together, we shared poems, flowers, gifts, laughter, dreams, as well as painful memories and traumas. What was yours was mine and vice versa, because everything was collective – everything was felt collectively: us against the restless night and the chaos of existence. Our differences led to each other, and in spite of them (sometimes, because of them), we felt at odds with what the world was offering to, and taking away from, us. It was a temporary fissure in our everyday lives, a joyful togetherness despite the distance the world has built for us. My mind wandered to something M. Jacqui Alexander once wrote: “the personal is not only political, but spiritual.” We parted ways with the promise to keep those moments alive, against the physical distance. We vowed to find them again, in the beauty of shared poetry and what keeps us nourished in this devastating time. We parted ways with the verses of a poem by Carol Ann Duffy: “All days / lost days, in and out of themselves / between dreaming / and dreaming again and half-remembering.”

To all
November 2022, Milan.
It’s all about distance: the way we imagine ourselves, and others, with a distant eye – the ways we imagine an otherwise. Futures that can be still shaped by our own very existence, by our refusal to accept what is imposed on us: violence, oppression, capitalist utilitarianism, racism and exploitation, disciplinary and normative structures.

To Abed
August 2022, Ramallah.
Mahmoud Darwish once wrote, “Even as they stand, flowers carry us to another place and another age. In their presence we are transformed, no longer the same people we had been in their absence… a flower can alter our internal landscape, when the grey ashes inside us are stirred by the fluttering of the green bird’s wings, and we go out to meet it and it enters us as night embraces day, as the visible marries the invisible.” You and Dana are like flowers, scarlet anemones facing the sunset on the hills of Haifa: your presence makes me feel like I am breathing a different space and time – a world that is not yet here, but that I can take with me and in my memories of you.

To me
April/May 2023, on a train.
I conceived these letters as an archive of love and utopia, a fragile thing to keep my own memory intact. Little did I know that they had to be fragmented – overlapping moments, geographies, and affects. It is hard to say what is here and now and what is there and then, because we live in transition, finding solace in our solitude, and freedom in collective endeavours. We shift between comforts and discomforts, between beauty and unbearable violence in blinking seconds. It’s all about distance, those spaces in-between, those apparent voids between us, those moments that haunt our imagination.

We live through distance – boundaries between each cell on our skin.

To Teo
September 2022, Milan.
“If we’re not supposed to dance, / Why all this music?” Gregory Orr writes. What if music was but altered notes of our own existence? Maybe if we stop dancing, we cease to exist; we fade into silence. Like the stars, dead for millennia now – they too are fragile. They too dance to majestic restless notes. They too disappear along with their music. “I can’t hear them, but I’m told they sing of things we have yet to learn” (Laura Grace Weldon). While we dance together you feel all this. I know it because I see it on your face, on your cheekbones, on your eyes, on your lips. On this September night, the city is no longer a city, but the ruins of a past time. And among those ruins, among those abandoned buildings, we see our past desires, our bodies still in wet intercourse, clothes and masks we used to wear, dramas and traumas experienced on our skin. And it is this ruined city that follows us in rhythm and sound. Because the ruins of our future belong to us, because our desire comes from the future. Because our desire was too loud to be heard.

Perhaps it scares us too much to even imagine something more, something different, something that apparently cannot exist. I want to think, imagine, and desire in a new way, because “our desire is nameless – but it is real,” wrote Mark Fisher once.

To all
November 2022, Milan.
What do you think it was that we lived together? Can we call it a future? A queer future?

To me
April/May 2023, on a train.
How can we shape the architecture of the future? How can we even exercise futurity when daily violence is inscribed on our bodies? The process of writing is about carving out a path. It is the only future I have. When I write, my whole body, an assemblage of flesh and concepts, engraves itself on the skin of this world, shaping its limits and its horizons on the page. There’s something utopian in writing: a word fades into the other, building concepts and worlds yet to be seen, read, and experienced. I think of futurity as something Sara Ahmed once wrote about feminism, “as a fragile archive, a body assembled from shattering, from splattering, an archive whose fragility gives us responsibility: to take care.”

To all
September 2025.
More than two years have passed, and the abyss between us has widened. Pixel by pixel, the genocide in Gaza unfolded in front of our eyes. It was not silence that struck me most, but the noise: the roar of bombs, the constant hum of drones, the breaking of flesh and rubble, the unrelenting litany of numbers screamed into the void. Distance has become an empire. If love seems scattered now, maybe it is because the ground itself has been shattered. We are still here, yet it is all about distance – still, always – but the kind that tastes of absence, of longing, of an impossible embrace. I have fewer words, broken, fragmented, dispersed in the thick air of collapse. I think of you – Dana, Abed, Teo. I wonder if distance has turned us into constellations. I write to you because I fear we have been pulled apart, not just by borders and massacres, but by the abyss that grief leaves between us. I wonder what the meaning of futurity is right now, if we still have space to imagine otherwise in this terrible present.

What does writing mean today?

• 1. UAWC is a grassroots organization supporting Palestinian farmers in reclaiming their land and sustaining agricultural life under occupation.