Something Just Like This

Why is it that we could very easily forget the very thing that we wanted the most?

I used to wonder why people need to be constantly reminded to follow their dreams; to never let go of them, to continue pursue them, and never, ever, give up. I used to think that if someone is no longer pursuing their dreams, it probably means that they simply don't want it anymore; they probably want something more, bigger, or just something different. But, I was young. Boy, was I young.

The truth is, I lose sight of my own dreams very easily. I didn't give them up--not necessarily--but I just... settled. When I found my life to be acceptable, I wouldn't hesitate to agree to settle. But it wasn't my dream. I do have my dreams. It's buried somewhere between my acceptance of the things I have and the things I would be okay if I will never get.

The truth is, the world can make you a better offer. If you don't accept it--if you choose to be happy with the ones you have already accepted, you will never be able to go far enough to reach closer to your dreams. You have to make way for nice new things to come into your life and challenge you, motivate and raise you up. You are only as good as the choices you make--so choose wisely.

Burnt Candles

So, how's the first 3 days of 2017 been serving you?

It's too early to tell, but perhaps it's the right time to start projecting your hopes and fears and dreams for the year.

I was on the cab back home this evening when I stumbled upon this post by TIME Magazine, and, within the relatively short 10 minutes of me reaching my destination, I almost cried.

This article gets me.

Other people don't.

I myself don't.

Apparently, science does.

For a good part of 2016, I spent my days smiling because someone thought I was doing awesome, when really, (because I hate myself) I was just doing what I thought was the way it's supposed to be. But later on, a couple of months nearing 2017, I found myself losing sleep because my brain just won't shut up. My body, on the other hand, can feel that it no longer has the energy. I've drained myself out of any life during the day that, at night, when I'm alone in the darkness of my room, I should've just fallen asleep. But instead, I was wide awake; trying so hard to fool myself to fall asleep that, when I do, it probably would've been well past midnight.

Come 2017, I want to be more grateful for what I am. I want to learn to accept myself and see it the way other people see me. I want to know that I'm strong enough for everything that comes my way. I want to know that I can always get better, and a smooth sea never make a skilled sailor. Maybe then, that post wouldn't kick my right to my gut the way it did today.

Maybe.

I hope so.

The Year of Realizing Things

I hate that my headline refers to Kylie Jenner's most famous quote of 2016. I hate that I know what Kylie Jenner's (other) famous quotes are. But alas, this is the year of realizing things.

Amazing how a 23-year-old can relate to an 18-year-old reality star, huh?

2016 is notorious for being a series of unfortunate events, and as part of the netizen, I can somehow agree to that. This is the year where so many bad things happen, the good (and great) things are easily overshadowed. As I grew to be more mature and realizing things, I read more about politics and economics this year, and boy do I hate to live in this world even more.

From Brexit to Donald Trump's victory, from Ahok's blasphemy case to the whole intolerance issues growing in Indonesia, I feel like this world, in general, is going south and I didn't even know if we were ever in the north at all!

So yeah, I'm freaking out, a bit.

In terms of personal life, here's a list of things that I just explored in 2016:

- Practiced a bit of yoga this year. Don't love it yet, but heck yeah I enjoy it! This is one of the things I hope to do again in 2017.

- Coming to love salad. I used to have some weird, bitter aftertaste whenever I eat a salad, but now, every now and then, I crave for a bowl of fresh salad with some protein (preferably chicken or salmon) in it.

- Eating chicken wings. I spent the first 22 years of my life not enjoying wings because I have no idea how to eat them, and now it's like my go-to comfort food. I mean, when life gets hard, it always helps to get chicken wings, beers, and a friend who shares the same tendency to whine about life.

- Balancing out my daily intake of caffeine with juice and breakfast of overnight oats. I no longer have breakfast with nasi uduk. Chicken porridge every once in a while, sure. But never nasi uduk. I do have a regular breakfast with a cup of coffee, and then another one after lunch. I don't have tea time. I have coffee time.

- As a result of my daily caffeine intake, I started to lose some good night sleep lately. (Note: It's probably stress and pressure, but I sure hope it's just caffeine)

- Responsibilities are real. It's hard.

I could list down a few more things, but let's just end this list here because otherwise it's becoming a whiny post about things I shouldn't be whining about. Let's just focus on what happened this year:

Okay, so, two of my best friends got married this year, which was really exciting. It's something that I've been waiting for since the beginning of 2016 (haha). I was a bridesmaid twice this year, and next year, I hope I could be a bridesmaid at least once again. It's always amazing seeing how my friends grew to be adults, creating their own families... We were daughters once, and now some of them (and eventually, hopefully, all of us) will have daughters of our own.

I did some traveling this year. First, it was a grand religious journey to the Promised Land and Mecca, as retold at great length here. And then, it was Bangkok; a Southeast Asian capital I actually want to revisit again and again (hi, mango sticky rice). After that, a completely alone, 33-hour stay at Singapore for a vaguely business purpose. And then, it was my first domestic travel in many years (if we don't count my Pulau Seribu trip from 2015) to Bromo, East Java. Yeah, no time to post the last two trips because... well, the holiday to Bromo was great and I did take some photos but I couldn't find the time to think of what to present here, while the solo trip Singapore? I came home sick and still having to come to work the next day, so, really, no time. (It was probably the very long bath I took that night after an exhausting day, or the fasting-at-a-foreign-country thing, or, you know, 33-hour-business-trip-is-not-good-for-you, plain and simple) Here's a post I wrote while waiting 6 damn hours for my flight home at Changi airport alone, to commemorate that visit.

Ultimately, folks, the biggest and another important highlight of my 2016 is this post. Kindness is real. You probably don't think that you deserve it (I still don't, because you know I hate myself) but if you get it, just say thanks. Always remember to be grateful. Don't ask why. Don't question. Quit wondering how you get lucky. It probably won't come so often.

Happy new year!

Craving

The first thing you need to admit is this:

You're lonely.

You like your own company. You enjoy solitary moments thinking about yourself and your favorite things. You strive towards a lifestyle of self-sufficiency. You teach yourself survival skills or find people who can help with things you gave up learning about. You like being alone. You're not exactly good at it, but you're getting better.

But you crave something else.

You crave someone.

You won't admit that your hands are cold and no amount of heat packs could warm it the way his hands would. You don't understand how good it is to let your lips feel his touch; you think you shouldn't know it from the first place so that you won't miss it, but you crave for it. You still won't admit that your life could and would get a little nicer, if you let him in.

You don't understand that you're not that good at being alone. 

Yes, it's probably better than being with someone who only messes up your life. Yes, someone can come into your life just because they choose to. Not everyone in your life will come because they just happen to bump into you somewhere. Someone can choose to be there; if they can figure out where the door is.

My broken bones

More than anything else in the world, I feel like sobbing and break into an ugly cry for two hours while rambling about why I'm so tired and scared and depressed. More than anything else in the world, I know that if I do that--if I do what I feel like doing--it would mean that I'm weak and stupid and not being grateful for what I have.

I know. I tell that to myself all the time.

I don't despise myself, but I am my worst enemy; my biggest weakness, and my harshest critic.

I'm not weak. I know I'm not. I'm probably not as strong as some people are, but by God believe me I've tried. I'm sorry if it wasn't good enough. I've tried to pull myself together and be tougher, put on a greater strength and smile, but it's never easy.

Nothing feels weirder than being in a position that people would kill for, only to feel like you don't deserve it and hate yourself for thinking so low of yourself.

A lot of things feel worse than that, but knowing that you cannot accept your own blessings will make you doubt whether you ever love yourself from the first place.

When I'm Still in Love With You

This is what I have always wanted to tell you:

You're not real. You might live somewhere in an undisturbed corner of my heart that is yet to be discovered, but you're not real. It's supposed to be empty; that spot you call home. You're a fragment of my idea about what it's like to have you, but that's not where you are supposed to be.

Maybe

We met by chance.

Or rather, we never actually met.

I don't know how tall (or short) you are. I don't know how your voice sounds like. How the curls of your hair sit on your head, or how rough your skin feels due to your hard work. I don't even know how thick your accent is, or the gestures your hands make when you speak, but I suspect you have them.

And also, you don't know me either.

You don't know what I do. You don't know what kind of paradox I am. You don't know how I can go from smiling, feeling genuinely happy one second and then listening to a very sad, melancholic song the next because I intentionally want to cry. How really shrill my voice is, or how I squeeze my hands so often someone might think I'm a puncher. You don't know how good my hair smells, or how I have a thousand different shades of nude lipstick at my disposal every day.

We may talk like we've known each other since childhood. Like I used to come around to your house and run around your backyard while your mother makes cupcakes. Like you used to pull my ponytail at school to make you look like a tough guy, but never missed a chance to pick some wild flowers for me on the way back home. But the truth of the matter is, we know nothing about each other.

We're aliens.

I didn't expect to hear anything from you ever again since the last time we made contact, until you appeared in my inbox once again. You were looking back at the camera, standing on a small bridge, and a charming Italian town behind you. I can clearly see peach-washed houses and bikes and brown-haired people on the background. You were smiling so brightly I didn't remember you to be this cute. The caption reads, Get a house here, maybe?

I smiled. You remember my dreams.

So maybe that's why I never forget you in my dreams.

Kindness

I didn't believe in kindness.

In this age where wit is almost always equal to sarcasm, and cynicism is the way to survival, kindness just seems like an unpopular way of being. I don't think I've been a kind person. I know I'm not a very good person, and kindness isn't a trait I'm usually associated with. I don't see a lot of kindness in my day-to-day life, which is sad, but I'd like to think that that's because it's just simply rare. People don't do kindness anymore. They'd rather be anything but kind. Kind is boring.

I don't know what to do with kindness.

I'm so used to the fact that no one bothers with being kind anymore, and since unkindness (if that's even a word) is contagious, I tend to think that it doesn't exist anymore.

But it does. 

Someone could be so kind to you, even though you don't think you've done anything good enough to deserve it.

Someone could shower you with so much kindness that you don't know what to do with it.

A Little Life's Jude St. Francis didn't know what to do with Harold's genuine kindness. He's not used to it. He's unfamiliar with it, and it feels alien to him. He thought such kindness is unnecessary; soon Harold is going to find out that he's not worth all the kindness, the love, the affection that Harold offered him. Soon, something will go wrong, and he's afraid that he won't be ready when that happens if he enjoys this happiness; the happiness of being the object of someone's kindness. But Harold loved him anyway. In spite of all the danger. In spite of every thing that happened. 

I hope one day you'd find a kind person--a genuinely kind person. Someone who's kind to you. Someone who sees your worth, even when you couldn't see it; when you didn't know you had any. I hope this kind person will be kind to you just because they want to. Because they know that you could do with some kindness. That you deserve it. That you're not as bad as you think you are--not even half of it. I hope that what they do to you will make you realise that you are capable of something. Their kindness will lift you up. Nurture you. Help you to be the best person you could be. I hope that this person will awaken something in you that have been asleep and hiding in the deepest, darkest corner of you--and stick a candle to it.

And that someday, you will grow to be the kind person that you wish you'd met. 

Two A.M Ramblings

I know that I write a lot of melancholic stuffs in this page, and if you know me in real life, I sometimes act like a comic and tend to laugh at my own jokes. But like I believe all of you are, I'm not some two-dimensional character in a teen-lit novel. When the light is out and the night is dark, and my sleepiness is somewhere but in my head, I'm actually a very serious person. I re-watch Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom for the umpteenth time, teach myself the politics between the Sunnis and Shiites, and sometimes, try to think of how to someday leave the world better than I found it. Shouldn't be a hard work, don't you think? We were born into such a messed up world, won't take a genius to find what could be improved. The challenge, however, is in where, and how, to start.

You know how I was born into a middle class family of Javanese descent with a Muslim faith, and live my entire life in Jakarta? You know how the demographics of Indonesia's big picture is? Yep, like me. My family is, politically speaking, center-right. I grew up in the southern part of suburban Jakarta, which, truthfully speaking, is mostly inhabited by people like me. Sure, many of them don't exactly share my background, but you know, more or less, we are the pribumi. Indonesians don't understand political correctness, so I believe that it's still generally acceptable to say that word: pribumi. Most of my friends, I have just recently realized, tick all of the criteria I have just mentioned, like me. Come to think of it, during my first 20 years, I hardly know anyone who doesn't look like me.

If this was America, I'd be a white Irish girl with perhaps brunette hair living in New York. I'd be a part of Trump's target demography, to be honest. I'd be in a box full of privileged people simply because of their color and their faith, though not exactly the kind that the 1% has. I'd be the majority. And you know how privileged the majority is? Always remember this all throughout your life: There is no right or wrong. There's only popular opinion. When you're a majority, of course it's easier to make your opinion the popular opinion.

Then real life came and I was suddenly in a concrete jungle of a capital city we call Jakarta, which we all have a love-hate relationship with, and I was forced to educate myself about who I am, what I am, and how I should interact with people. I had to learn the hard way about my place in the actual world; about joining a community, an entire society that I had never been really exposed with. All of a sudden, here I am. In the middle of a culturally and ethnically diverse society that I wasn't aware I was lacking the experience of. All of a sudden, I had to learn how to place myself in this world, and where I am is really important to learn how to be politically correct.

Suddenly, I was a minority. Sure, sometimes it makes you feel like you're somewhat interesting. But it could also make you feel like being in an aquarium: everyone was watching you, examining you, asking you what it's like to be in your world. Suddenly, it's just a weird feeling. Not exactly sucks, but weird.

Now, imagine that Jakarta is a miniature of America: people from different ethnics, cultures and background flocked together to create its own dynamic. Just like America, where the immigrants are the real force behind their dynamics, Jakarta is also severely dependent on these people who once came to try their luck in the big city. This past holiday, I realized what an hellhole Jakarta is during the Eid-ul Fitr, when every last person I know left this city for--oh, God knows what. A holiday, maybe. Or a family gathering in their hometowns. Everyone was updating their social media from all over the world that I couldn't even keep up where each of them went. Instead of a 3-day family visitation in a small countryside like everyone else, I was here. In Jakarta. Shops closed, malls barely functioning (and I know this, because I went to the mall that Eid-ul Fitr evening since I was done with my family gatherings) supermarkets couldn't keep their promise of fresh fruits and vegetables, restaurants running out of ingredients and struggling to serve the overflowing of customers with limited waiters... There isn't much glory to this city when it comes to this holiday, and I was left wondering what would happen to Jakarta had none of these people come back. A real-life Walking Dead, I suppose.

So, this is why I understand that had I been born American, I wouldn't be supporting Donald Trump if my life depends on it. I probably don't really understand how immigrants feel like a threat in America, but I do know that you can't hope for a better future when you're not willing to co-exist with other people who don't look like you. I'm not even going to start with political or religious views here (because God knows it's become an issue here in Indonesia, too) but just start with people who look like us. My government always said it's trying its best to keep Papua in this country, but to what extent? Nobody's doing much for them. Those who live here, people like me, who look like me, probably first thought of them as a bunch of thugs. If we have no gun controls, it's probably only a matter of time before we also have a #BlackLivesMatter movement here around us. Because Indonesians--I don't know if you haven't noticed, but we are brutally hostile. No, we're not friendly. That's a propaganda your primary school teacher told you, the way they teach North Korean kids that Kim Il-Sung is a God. No, we're not friendly. We just like to believe we are. Or maybe we are... but only to people who look (and think, and dress) like us.

A Little Life

It is no longer a secret within humanity that life is short--perhaps even too short to experience all good things in life. There's always too many good movies to watch, too many good songs to listen, too many delicious cakes to enjoy... but if this year you are planning to read one--and only one--book, make it Hanya Yanagihara's sophomore novel A Little Life.

I don't know how to start talking about this book--not then, when I went straight to review it on Goodreads, and not even now, when it's been about a month since I finished reading (and weeping). I spent quiet a long time to finish, because there was no way life didn't happen during the course of the 700+ pages. I brought this book as a companion for my flight to Bangkok back in April, but it gave me a terrible sickness on the plane. I just couldn't--God, I don't know why! But I tell you this: this is the kind of book that stays with you; it lingers for a long time that I haven't even done feeling the aftermath. This is the kind of book that doesn't come too often in life. I haven't even lived my life long enough or read lots enough to know that, but believe me when I say that you are going to thank me for recommending me this book someday.

The story started out as something of a weird, retro image of four young men fresh out of a prestigious New England college. Jude, JB, Willem and Malcolm are going to be the main characters of the story, even though as the story developed, I feel like Jude was the sun, and everybody else was some planets that revolve around him. Granted, this novel is about Jude. I just wasn't convinced enough by reading the first twenty pages. At the end of the day, I feel like the main focus of the friendship should also involve Andy Contractor, their best friend and orthopedist who's also the only doctor in the world that Jude trusts his condition with.

Now, I knew even before I purchased this book that it's going to be a gruesome experience. It's an upsetting novel at worst, but also sweet and pretty John Green at best. What makes the whole story compelling is how Jude St. Francis (he's the sun, remember?) theoretically went full circle, through so much in his life, only to go back to the place where he started. Now, Jude is a ruthless litigator at a certain New York law firm. Nobody knows where he came from, what ethnicity he was, his sexual orientation, and he never ever mentioned his past. The present Jude is what everybody had. Now imagine how annoying to have a friend who only listens but never shares.

Jude battles a kind of self-waged war against himself every single day. He grew up being told that he does not deserve love, that he's unworthy of kindness, that he was made for a certain purpose. He was raised in a certain way that he believed that is what he is until the death of him. He's reluctant to feel love--any kind of love--from anybody because he think he doesn't deserve it. He pushes people away, even people who made it clear that they care about him, that they do not expect anything in return from him. When someone told him that they love him, he's convinced that it's only because they don't know him well enough; or the time hasn't come for them to see how terrible he really is, and that they would be disappointed to have loved him at all. Jude basically sabotaged himself into not feeling happiness at all.

The book could use some slightly better editing, but the words were so deep--sometimes philosophical--and beautiful, I wish I could frame them. I'll admit that it's a bit too long, but to cut any part of it will lessen the beauty of the little life that we're supposed to witness. We were given a chance to grow old together with Jude St. Francis; let's not make it not worth the while.