YOU HAVE AN INTERNATIONAL CALL.

One evening, my mom and I had been comparing how different communication used to be from how it is now — back in the nineties versus today. She brought up the Christmas Eve call: you probably already know this story, she said. I didn't. So later, sitting at the dining table, still turning it over, I got up and walked into their room, where they were lying down, mid-conversation about something else entirely.

What did you say to each other, I asked. How did you greet each other?

My dad's gaze drifted to the side, toward nothing in particular, and a slow smile started to form. He didn't answer right away. I watched him take his time, like he was getting into character, like the line needed to be delivered just right — the way it had been delivered once before, more than thirty years ago, on a night I wasn't there for but have since pieced together from what they've told me.

On a Christmas Eve in the early nineties, my mom was working the midnight shift at the telephone company, one of the busiest nights of the year. She sat in a row of switchboards, operators shoulder to shoulder, a bulky headset clamped over her ears, the board's layout something she'd had to memorize over time, until her hands knew it without her having to think. Calls came in constant and overlapping, the whole room a kind of held breath that never let go.

Her supervisor came up beside her. You have an international call, she said.

My mom knew right away who it was. Who else would call her from another country. But there was a second thing underneath the knowing — disbelief that the call had gone through at all, on a night this busy, on lines this overloaded, all the way from San Francisco to her desk in Manila.

Her coworkers already knew. They'd heard about the boyfriend overseas, the long distance, the long wait between calls. So when word came through that an international call was trying to reach her, on Christmas Eve of all nights, she could see it on their faces — happy, curious, a little delighted on her behalf, the way you look at someone when something good is about to happen to them.

She picked up. Hello?

Half a world away, it was still daytime on Christmas Eve when my dad picked up the landline at his family's house in San Francisco. For my mom, working her shift through the night, Christmas Eve had already tipped into something later, something darker outside the windows, even as his day was still wide open. He dialed 00 for international, then 63 for the Philippines, not knowing if the call would go through at all on a night every line in the country would be busy. There was only one telephone company in the Philippines then, every call funneled through it, which meant somewhere in that switchboard was the woman he was trying to reach — if he could just get someone to find her.

He told the operator who picked up that the woman he was calling was an operator too. It must have meant something, because somehow, through the noise of a hundred other calls being placed that same night, his was the one that found her.

Calls were expensive, rationed, saved for occasions. Letters were what they actually had — slower, but steadier, the thing that could be counted on. A letter took two or three weeks to cross the ocean, but my mom said she stopped paying much attention to the wait after a while. Once my dad's letters started arriving, one practically every day, the lag stopped mattering. There was always something already on its way.

My mom wrote my dad long letters, thoughtful and heartfelt, the kind that took real time to write. My dad answered differently. He bought greeting cards, the kind with a few preprinted lines already on the front, and underneath them he wrote his own messages, short, a little funny, never trying to be more than what they were. He sent one every day, for a year.

They both kept everything. Every letter, every card, saved rather than thrown away, like each one might still be needed later. When my mom eventually moved to the States to be with him, she packed the letters too, carried them across the same ocean the words had already crossed once before.

A few months before I moved to the Philippines, I was going through old family photos, looking for nothing in particular, when I found him — my dad, young, a film camera held up at arm's length, taking a selfie before selfies had that name. In his other hand, he held up a folder, several photos of my mom taped across its front, all of her looking back at the camera at once.

I flipped it over without thinking, the way you flip over any old photo, checking for a date, a name, anything. And there it was — his handwriting, big and messy and unmistakably his, a message written to her more than thirty years ago. He called her D, the same thing he still calls her now. He wrote Babe, the name they still call each other today, like nothing in between ever happened to it. And somewhere in the middle of it, four words from their song — I got you babe — the same song that still finds its way into the house sometimes, decades later.

I sat there with the photo in my hands and felt something click into place. These weren't relics. The names were still in use. Whatever this photo had been sent to say to her, in 1990-something, from San Francisco to Manila, tucked inside a greeting card, was still being said.

Hello, he said finally. Merry Christmas.

My mom laughed from where she was lying beside him. You're so dramatic, she said, swatting at his arm, and just like that he was back in the room with us, grinning, caught.

I sat there for a second, not saying anything, doing the math without meaning to. Thirty-some years between that phone call and this one, and the line hadn't changed. Neither had the names they call each other. Neither had the song — the one that still finds its way into the kitchen some evenings, my dad dancing along to it without seeming to notice he's doing it. Like it's just background. Like it isn't the same four words he once wrote on the back of a photo, in handwriting I'd later find by accident.

Nothing about the way they talk to each other now is rationed. No calling cards, no operators, no waiting two or three weeks to hear what the other person has to say. They can reach each other instantly, constantly, for free, from any room in the house. And yet some nights, unprompted, my dad still says the line the way he said it on a switchboard call decades ago — like it's not a memory he's retrieving, but a place he still has the keys to.

I used to think the obstacles were what made it romantic — the waiting, the cost, the operators who had to find each other before two people could. But maybe it was never the obstacles. Maybe it was always just them, finding each other anyway, however the lines happened to be open that day.