In euclidena cylinder, $C$, is the line giving the shortest distance between two points P and Q unique?

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I am a bit confused. There are infinitely many lines between two distinct points P and Q on the cylinder, but when we define the distance between P and Q we take the minimum of the set of distances between copies of P and Q in $\mathbb{R}^2$.

It's clear that you can have two paris of copies that have the same minimum distance from each other, but will the line connecting these two pairs always descent into the same line in C?