I'm not a new comer to this long distance relationship thing.

I've been stupid enough to do it before. That time, I was the flyer. For an idea about how that ended up, you can read this little treatise about airports that I wrote a few months ago. It sums things up nicely, I think.

It also goes a long way to explaining the hesitancy I felt about going into my current relationship.

I'd done this before. And it ended horribly. It rebuilt walls that I had painstakingly dismantled so that I could experience the joy of committing myself completely to a relationship.

Walls that I am painstakingly trying to dismantle again, even as we speak.

It's slow going, knocking down walls.

Especially ones which have the sorts of foundations that mine are built on.

This is not to say that having these walls in place is acceptable. It is simply saying that this is how it is for me.

I'd love to call in the wreckers to knock the whole thing down in a day, but it just doesn't work like that. I need to dismantle them better, crack the foundations and ensure that they can't be built again.

It's bloody hard work.

But it's worth the effort.

"Fortress Around Your Heart"--Sting

Under the ruins of a walled city
Crumbling towers in beams of yellow light
No flags of truce, no cries of pity
The siege guns had been pounding through the night
It took a day to build the city
We walked through its streets in the afternoon
As I returned across the fields I'd known
I recognised the walls that I once made
I had to stop in my tracks for fear
Of walking on the mines I'd laid

And if I've built this fortress around your heart
Encircled you in trenches and barbed wire
Then let me build a bridge
For I cannot fill the chasm
And let me set the battlements on fire

Then I went off to fight some battle
That I'd invented inside my head
Away so long for years and years
You probably thought, or even wished that I was dead
While the armies all are sleeping
Beneath the tattered flag we'd made
I had to stop in my tracks for fear
Of walking on the mines I'd laid

And if I've built this fortress around your heart
Encircled you in trenches and barbed wire
Then let me build a bridge
For I cannot fill the chasm
And let me set the battlements on fire

This prison has now become your home
A sentence you seem prepared to pay
It took a day to build the city
We walked through its streets in the afternoon
As I returned across the lands I'd known
I recognised the fields where I'd once played
I had to stop in my tracks for fear
Of walking on the mines I'd laid

And if I've built this fortress around your heart
Encircled you in trenches and barbed wire
Then let me build a bridge
For I cannot fill the chasm
And let me set the battlements on fire