I’m looking at a globe right now. It may be the one that still has “USSR” marked clearly across the biggest block of single nationcolor on the sphere, but that doesn’t matter. A globe makes the world look so small, so accessible. I can walk my fingers from Antwerp to Argentina in seconds, if I so choose. A distance like half a state is meaningless – a thumb blanks it from view. And yet such distances are meaningful – somehow important parts of my life and others’ lives. Making a decision which seems so small on a globe can be making a decision which affects the rest of someone’s life – you can tell distance is not on a globe when it’s measured in miles of separation and loneliness and missing, even (maybe especially) the potential kind.