Keep Your Love Close, Even When You’re Miles Apart

They've been doing this for eighteen months. She finished her PhD in Berlin and he stayed on the Galician coast with the architecture studio. Every Sunday night, Lucía schedules five wallpapers for Matías's week ahead, one for each day. Wednesday's is always a photo from when they first met, back when neither of them knew they'd end up here. On Tuesday at 9:14 AM, Matías unlocks his phone to check the weather and finds a snapshot of the snowy Spree with a small handwritten note: "the ducks are still here. so are you." He stops for a second. Then he laughs to himself, alone in the middle of the office.

Hugo moved to Montreal for a job offer he couldn't turn down. Carla stayed in Valencia finishing her master's. The time difference grinds them down: when she's having breakfast, he's still asleep. They figured out they could stop chasing each other. Now Carla leaves him a wallpaper every night before bed, so he finds it when he wakes up. At 1:57 PM Montreal time, Hugo steps out of a meeting, unlocks his phone and sees a blurry photo of the Mercado Central taken from the passenger seat of the car, with a single line underneath: "smelled like oranges today. they'll come back". It's enough to hold him until eleven at night.

Noa is an illustrator. Tomás is doing a research residency in Seoul. She draws him little vignettes on her iPad — a persimmon, a cat, her grandfather fishing at the port of Santurtzi — and sends them to his lock screen once a week, never on a fixed day, so it's always a surprise. On a random Thursday at 6:12 PM Korean time, Tomás leaves the lab and sees a new drawing on his phone: two cups, one empty, one full, and underneath the word "soon". He doesn't write anything back. He just stands there with the phone in his hand until the light changes.