Sincerely, Your Long- Distance Lover

I am writing this from my hotel room in Yokohama, Japan, with the TV on. I am here only for 10 days, watching and immersing myself in the shows at the Tokyo Performing Arts Meeting 2016, listening to talks, and discussing ideas (and merrymaking at a club by the port) with fellow participants. When all this is over, I’ll be back, teaching in my hometown of Nasipit, Agusan del Norte after a short layover in Manila. Google tells me that it’s 5°C outside — so different from home, and yet how I love it. The cold makes me wonder, what is warmth, anyway? And what exactly do I mean whenever I say the word “home”?

I’ve been living outside Metro Manila for almost two years. I moved to Agusan to finish my MA thesis on my grandfather, and decided to stay and work there afterwards. I had realized I couldn’t save much money in Manila (or earn enough without selling my limbs and my soul), and that I needed to walk all my talk about decongesting the country’s capital.

Aside from leaving my immediate family, the hardest part of that choice was physically parting from my girlfriend of, at that time, three years. What made it even tougher was that I was imposing it on myself, too; I had no employer stationing me in Agusan, or a lucrative scholarship grant to study in a prestigious university there. The best explanation I had was the feeling that it was “the right thing to do.” Like most couples involved in a long-distance relationship (or LDR), the first thing we had to embrace was uncertainty.

LDRs were bad ideas for some of our friends as they often led to the end of their relationships. People often asked us, “Pa’no na kayo?” after learning that I was leaving for the province. We never really knew how to answer that question. And being aware of society’s ills, we both knew that there were numerous cases of OFW mothers and fathers returning home with/to bad news. Anything could happen, and the distance just aggravates it. Uncertainty, in that case, is not good.

But several months ago, traveling to Yokohama was also unthinkable. I did not have a ticket or the budget for a trip outside the country. It was only when Marc of the Japan Foundation got in touch with me that I realized my luck. He contacted me through Twitter, no less. Who would’ve thought that such transactions could be made within 140 characters?

In the cold, I still sigh in disbelief that I am here. At the same time, the shows that I booked to watch planted my feet on the red brick sidewalks of Bashamichi. I got to see a gallery by Hong Kong performer, Body Lab for Priori Tropism. In it, a short film by their youths was shown, recounting their experiences with their Filipina domestic helpers. They all told heartwarming stories of their yayas and expressed gratitude. But all their stories ended in heartbreak as their yayas “needed to go back to the Philippines to fix a problem at home”; some had husbands running away with other women. The image that struck me the most was when one interviewee remembered waking up one day with his yaya missing. She left them two toys — a dinosaur and a doll — at their bedside tables, for him and his sister whom she took care of.

At a small space in Tokyo, I also watched a Japanese theater group called “shelf” do a rendition of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, a story of misplaced dissatisfaction and/or adultery. The group made the play less misogynistic than the original by altering timelines and switching characters in the middle of dialogues such that in the end, you are left only with a smoking gun. I learned that there are fewer and fewer things we can be sure of in this age of online personae, flight and aloneness.

While I often wander on my own here, the week was kind as I was introduced to people I never thought I’d be friends with. One of the persons I was introduced to was Sinta Wibowo, a woman of Indonesian descent who grew up in Belgium, and she had interesting views about protest and North Korea (which happened to launch a missile the day we talked). Another was an Australian artistic director, Joel Stern, who had a novel idea about the politics of listening (which I don’t think I have the right to divulge here). I shared with him how protests in the Philippines were shut down by using Katy Perry’s Firework and Willie Revillame’s novelty songs.

 I also met an Argentinian couple, Juan Manuel and Paula, who thought I was an “amigo latinoamericano,” or more specifically a Peruvian, and they talked to me in Spanish at first. (Me? A Peruvian?) Together with Bernadette, a Sydney-based Filipina who held a degree in anthropology from the same school as I, we drank at the pub until closing. We made the funniest linguistic connections here and there, joked about world domination, and had another round of Yebisu at a nearby Lawson’s convenience store. We parted ways with Juan telling me this: “Remember, Peruvians and Argentinians will always be hermanos.” In the middle of all this, I saw my classmate from third grade and high school, Chris Aronson, attending the same festival with his Japanese friend, Chikara. Again, who’d have thought?

The horns, bellowing from the massive ships off the coast of Japan’s most prominent port city, remind me of Nasipit, a much (much) smaller port town. These distances have been teaching me to trust uncertainty, for it is frightening but it is also beautiful. Moving away has taught me to treasure the things I am sure of. I got to know myself better — what I wanted, what I had, and what I didn’t need.

So I make the most out of each of my trips to Manila. In this life where we can be unsure of almost everything, being sure of someone is a godsend. And I know where I am home.