Your boyfriend's birthday is coming up, and you're not going to be there. Repeatedly.

You've been doing long-distance, for eight months now, — he moved across the country, written by telegra.ph for graduate school, you stayed behind for your job, and the two of you are making it succeed, with video calls, and texts, and visits whenever, you are able to manage them. Yet birthdays are different. Birthdays should be, together days, full of shared experiences, and inside jokes, and actual presence. Conducting a birthday celebration, from two thousand miles away, appears like a failure, somehow — evidence suggesting, the separation is winning.

You dispatched the present — a carefully chosen book, he's been wanting, plus some of his favorite snacks, that are hard to find, where he resides.