Distance

I don’t particularly like birthdays. They remind me that I have grown a year older. As people grow older, we become more forgetful, they say. I’m 19 now, yet I still remember that particular day in my childhood that might have sparked my disinterest toward birthdays.

It was the day I turned 8. I had been hearing “Happy birthday” since that morning, but I wasn’t exactly feeling happy about it. By noon, I had decided to lie down on the floor. Mama scolded me for being stubborn because I wouldn’t budge. I did not want to. The coldness of the marble tiles felt comforting, and the sight of the four tiny wooden legs of the lamesita I had been staring at overhead seemed interesting to me.

“Mama, do you think Papa knows what day it is today?”

“Of course.”

Her words added to the list of things I had found comforting at that moment. I focused my sight once again on the four wooden legs. On that small table was our telephone, and it was the one thing that was making me feel uncomfortable. I was waiting for it to ring; all day, that’s what I did.

By night, I finally decided to move to my own bed. I wasn’t exactly sad; the warmth of my blanket and the sight of neon green stars looming over me as they glowed in the ceiling seemed comforting.

It was 2 or 3 a.m. when I was awakened by Mama’s eager voice telling me there was a phone call for me. As soon as her words
sunk in, I did what I had been imagining I would do since the day before: I rushed to the lamesita, picked up the phone, and held it close to my ear.

“Hello, Neng, si Papa ’to.”

It sounded jolly and shaky at the same time. A distinct tenor voice that I had not heard for so long, but strangely felt familiar. Maybe because I had been trying to reconstruct the exact timbre of his voice and playing it over and over inside my head.

“Sorry, Neng, ha. I was supposed to call you yesterday, but
there was no signal.”

I felt like not forgiving him for that excuse, but it was only years later, when I had grown older, that I understood.

When people are oceans apart, it becomes hard to communicate. You now belong to different time zones and different surroundings, which make you perceive things a little bit differently from each other. Connecting the two ends of such a distance can prove to be challenging, especially when stable phone signals and/or internet connection are inadequate, even nonexistent.

Papa practically lived in the ocean, on huge cargo ships that traveled across the world. It started in the early ’90s, after my kuya was born. Since then, we’ve had to make do with handwritten letters, phone calls, and, later on, emails and video calls for the nine months or more that he is away.

“Hello, Neng. I got you something I bought here in London for your birthday. Have you been eating and sleeping well?”

Whenever he came home, we’d have pasalubong of bags of chocolates and piles of toys and new gadgets, to make up for the time we had spent apart. Then, after some three months of rest from work, it was time for him to go out into the seas again.

The cycle of Papa leaving and coming home went on. And most years, on my birthdays that we unfortunately had to celebrate apart, he would almost always send the same greeting—whether it was two times warmer because he was in Africa, or seven hours
later because he was in Belgium.

“Happy birthday, Neng. You’ve grown a year older now. I hope you have been eating and sleeping well. If you do, you must be growing a lot bigger and taller, too. When I come home, I might not be able to recognize you easily because you’ve grown up so much.”

Eventually, I stopped growing at 5’1”, and my weight just shifted around 43 to 45 kg. I was easily recognizable, even when I changed into a new pair of eyeglasses, or when I got a bit more tan from being under the sun. Just minor physical changes here and there.

But I did grow up in a lot of other aspects. I grew more understanding, and I grew out of asking for toys and new gadgets for my birthdays. I wonder if Papa had found it easy to recognize the constantly changing me that he would arrive to every time he came home all these years. I wonder if he knew that pink wasn’t my favorite color anymore, or that I liked playing soccer over volleyball.

Eventually, I realized that, with time, people were allowed to grow. But distance — physical distance — can cause people to grow apart, too.

In less than two months, I’d be turning 20. It’s something I am not particularly looking forward to. Meanwhile, Papa has been spending his time at home, and I have been hearing him say he wants to take a break from working overseas.

I hope he does this time. I would not ask for a better gift than to finally close the distance.

* * *

Juvelle Villanueva, 19, is a communication arts senior at the University of the Philippines Los Baños.