The Distance Between Us

By Althea Lorraine Jules Servano

More often than not, mornings came like a storm. My Lola’s voice cracked the day open from the dining table, slicing through sleep like sunlight on water. The bathroom faucet ran with no pause, seemingly unable to catch its own breath. Breakfast clinked in plates as the pans continued to sizzle, while my siblings and I circled each other, a little chaotic orbit of noise and affection. It was loud, definitely—but it was somehow the type of loudness that held in itself a certain type of comfort.

Then I left.

From a city that boasted the slowness of the hands of its clock, to a place where time stood still for nobody.

From the warm tangle of a family, to a city where even the stars in the sky seemed foreign.

I moved into a condo just 20 square feet in size, where the walls felt hollow and the silence echoed louder than any scream. The floor was clean, almost untouched. The air was still, but not in a comforting way. It was the type of stillness that made you realize just how far you were from everything you knew.

There’s no one here to knock on the bathroom door. No one complained about who used up the shampoo. No footsteps running down the hall. Just me, the hum of the fridge, and the sound of my own breathing.

I didn’t know homesickness could live so quietly. It didn’t come like grief, loud and sudden. It came like dust—settling slowly, until one day you wake up and everything is covered in it. I missed the noise, not because I loved the chaos, but because it meant I belonged to something bigger than myself.

But here’s the truth: I’ve grown. In the silence, I started to hear myself more clearly.

College didn’t just strip things away, it gave me something too. I met people who carry their own versions of belonging inside them. People who taught me how to laugh again, how to show up, how to listen. I sat in cafeterias with strangers who became friends. I walked through campus with people who knew nothing of my past but still made space for me in their present. And in their company, I found a new kind of comfort. A softer kind of connection.

We learned how to care for each other in small ways. Someone always had an extra piece of paper. Someone always waited when you lagged behind. Someone always offered to walk you back, even if their dormitory was in the opposite direction.

This is the cost of loving: to know people in more than one place, to plant pieces of myself like seeds in distant soil. I pay with absence, with the ache of being spread too thin, like light stretched across the horizon at dusk, never quite touching the edges.

And now, I’m not sure where I belong.

Is it back in Iloilo, where my Lola’s voice still rings through the mornings?

Is it here, in this tiny room where I’ve taught myself how to cook and cry and hope again?

Or is it somewhere in between, in the space I’ve carved out among the people I’ve chosen and who’ve chosen me back?

But isn’t this what it means to be here? Carrying the weight of every place I’ve called home, feeling the pull of the tide within me even when I stand still. I am a map, drawn with the lines of departure and return. It’s no longer about a fixed place—it’s a memory I wear, a distance I inhabit, always reaching forward, always evolving.

Maybe home isn’t a single place anymore. Maybe it’s a collection of moments—like a bowl of rice, a quiet walk, a laugh shared in the dark. I’ve come to understand that belonging isn’t where you’re from, but where you’re becoming.

I will never completely return to what I once knew. Part of me will always be elsewhere, caught in the thin line between here and there, where the air hums with names I once whispered, where the ground still holds my footprints like a promise.

And so I wake, now, not to Lola’s voice anymore, but to the buzz of my phone’s 6:30 am alarm and the quiet assurance that I am still changing, still growing. That the ache in my chest isn’t just sadness—it’s expansion. It’s me stretching into someone new. I am no longer one thing, but many—a mosaic of all the places that have held me, of all the faces that have known me. And though I am stretched thin, I am never broken, only fuller. Always, always fuller.

I carry my past with me. In memory. In the outdated humor of jokes. In the way I fold my shirts. In the way I love.

Maybe, for the first time, I realize that home isn’t a place you return to—it’s a place you build, piece by piece, wherever you go.

Althea Lorraine Jules D. Servano is an Ilongga and undergraduate student at the University of the Philippines Diliman. She writes about memory, place, and the stories that bind people to where they come from—and to where they are becoming.