Soft Bread From The Oven

I live in Tokyo. My family is in Jakarta and my closest ones as well.
The math of that is simple and I do it more often than I would like. How many flights a year. How many days inside those flights that are actually together and awake and not just sitting in the same room scrolling. The number is small. I know people who see their mothers every Sunday and complain about it, and I am not allowed to find that annoying, but I do.

There is a particular competence you build when you live alone, far from everyone, in a city that was not yours to begin with. You learn the trains. You learn which conbini has the bread you like. You learn to carry the heavy suitcase up the stairs yourself because there is no one to hand the other end to. You learn to call the gas company in a language you are still, after all these years, only borrowing. None of this is hard, exactly. It is just constant and after a while you forget it is even running, the way you forget the refrigerator until the night it stops and the silence wakes you up.

Every day, all day, be fine, be capable, be the one who has it handled. And mostly I am. Mostly it is even good. I built this life on purpose and I would build it again.

But.

Somebody posted a thing recently about living abroad, about how you never quite belong where you are building your new life and you feel like a visitor when you go home. Pieces of you scattered across all the places you have called home. I read it on the train and felt that specific click of recognition, the one where a stranger has reached into your chest and named the thing you assumed was only yours. He wrote it beautifully. And then at the end his brother tells him not to worry so much, distance makes the time precious, you are not that far behind. Tidy. A little bow on it. Sweet.

It is the same move I do on myself, every time, at the exact moment the feeling gets too big. Reframe it into something I can set down. Tell myself the ache is actually a gift if I look at it from the right angle. Distance may suck but it can also bring something beautiful, sparkle emoji, and then back to the trains, back to the bread, back to handling it.

I have stopped pretending the reframe is the same as the feeling going away.

Because it does not go away. I can be genuinely okay, content even, glad of the life I have, and the want is still sitting there in the next room. The want is very simple and I am almost embarrassed by how simple it is. For a few moments, somewhere in a normal day, I would like to feel safe, soft, and loved not just that I am managing. I would like, occasionally, to put the suitcase down and let someone else carry the other end, and to be allowed, for one minute, to not be strong.

This is the most basic thing a person needs from the people close to them. It is the floor, not some luxury upgrade. And yet I have spent years making it small enough to fit in my pocket, taking it out only when I am alone, looking at it, putting it back.

I used to think being okay meant the want had been resolved. That if I were truly fine the feeling would dissolve and leave clean. It took me a long time to understand that being okay is not the absence of the want. It is just that I have gotten very good at carrying it quietly. Those are different things. One is peace. The other is a skill, and like any skill the danger is that you get so good at it nobody can tell you are doing it, including, on the worst days, yourself.

I am not going to tell you that distance is beautiful, even though sometimes it is. I am not going to tell you I have made peace with it, because peace implies the war is over and mine just goes quiet for a while and then starts up again on a Tuesday for no reason, usually when I am tired.

What I can tell you, if you are also out here building a life far from everyone who knew you first, is this. You are allowed to be okay and to miss being held at the same time. You are allowed to love your independence and resent it in the same breath. The feeling that you should be over this by now is a lie the strong woman tells you to keep you efficient. You do not have to be over it. You just have to stop pretending it is gone.

To receive love. To be soft and let softness be returned. And yet somewhere along the way I learned to treat it as a luxury, almost an indulgence, something I have to earn by first proving I do not need it.

Another day of being a human, a woman.