Where Are We?

I'm away from home again right now, another fieldwork - or let's just say, another attempt to getaway from life, though life follows me here as I'm here for work. But it's certainly better to stay at home and following the routine that drives me mad. I've been lost in touch with myself, probably, for these past two weeks. I feel so detached from myself and my emotion. It felt like I was floating sometimes, I felt weightless for not knowing where I was and my existence on this planet. I met plenty of new people, but they're like clouds. I've been having a hard time with my memory, I keep forgetting things; places I've been, things I did, people I met, conversation we had, and the feelings I thought I felt. It reached its fucking peak last weekend. I didn't even know what happened but I died inside. My head froze, or worse, it constantly telling me to end this all. Not only did I feel the dark cloud hanging in my head, but everything about life be...

It's been almost five months since, and I've been having a hard time staying awake again lately. I easily get sick, which is so weird. I eat healthy food, drink enough water, I have enough sleep, exercise regularly, and keep my routine on track, and here I am -  catching flu for over a week. Weak! This year did not even come close to what I imagined or planned, it would be. To be honest, now I don't remember what I wanted anymore, and now it's October already. The year 2020 is coming in three months, and if you're still here, you'll be 30 in five months; and if you're still here, I wouldn't stop talking about how exciting it is for us to turn thirty! How much we're grown, what we've accomplished, and what's next for the future. I think it was fun to talk about the future before, to make plans and give clarity to the life you had made peace with, and I have been trying to escape. But it is not fun to talk about the future now, I don't...

Pauline Laubie: Why did you stop loving life? Matthew Morgan: Well, you don't love life itself. You love, uh, places, animals, people, memories, food, literature, music. And sometimes you meet someone... who requires all the love you have to give. And if you lose that someone, you think everything else is gonna stop too. But everything else just keeps on going. Giraudoux said, you can miss a single being, even though you are surrounded by countless others. Those people are like... like extras. They cloud your vision, they're a meaningless crowd. They... They're an unwelcome distraction. So you seek oblivion in solitude. But solitude only makes you wither. Those are my favourite lines from one of my favourite movies called Last Love . And that picture above is Matthew and Pauline, the two main characters in the movie. Matthew lost his wife a few years back, and he began to stop loving life since. One day he met Pauline on a bus, and the...

Even in some nights I can't see you in the dark, tonight I decided to turn off the light. Meeting people now is different, I just feel detached instantly. I am not talking about opposite sex, I am talking about people in general. Though I have some close friends, but I think I only have Yenny as the one who knows me best. She's like my other self, it doesn't take much time to define the situation even when we don't always agree on everything, we probably share the same rationality for a lot of things in life. Yenny and I lived under the same roof for quite some times in the past. She witnessed many young  behaviour I tried to hide from my parents, obviously. Haha. There are simply so many things I am grateful about meeting her. She was my first friend in college. That day I left my phone at home and I needed a phone to call my brother to bring it to campus for me, so I asked her. I simply had no friends back then and my friends did not make it easier either t...

Oh, hi there! It's actually been fifteen minutes since I wrote the title,  and I still pretty much have no idea what to write on this page. Where am I? That's the question I ask myself almost everyday. I am in Jakarta right now, geographically. I just finished lunch with my old time college friend who works around here (Cikini), who just finished her master last year in Singapore, and who just told me she's getting another job in ASEAN next month. I'm happy for her, she deserves better. Not that her current job is not good enough but she's been there for 5 goddamn years and still no signal for permanent position. So, the concept of having another job with better experience and better money definitely make more sense. Or maybe, above all, I'm happy for her because she knows where she's going and life excites her more than it does to me. Around a week before I left to Jakarta, I finally decided to see a doctor. It was quite possibly the ...

I dreamed about you again last night. In the midst of winter town, I saw you there waiting to be found. The air was chill and the town was bright, waiting for Christmas. I gave myself a coffee, walking towards you staring blindly to the night. I said ‘hi, how have we been?’ Was the first thing that came to mind. I know, it has always been us when it comes to him, the one I met when I was twenty one. He stared at me for awhile, like he always did on the telephone line. My face turned red, my eyes turned warm, I remembered summer 2015 when I kissed him good night - this has been a bittersweet love, I kept that in mind. How could it be so cruel, I lost myself in a noisy crowd. We got all teary, then hugged each other tight. It’s been a long journey not having each other around. It’s been such misery not to be able to hold each other tight. I put myself on his lap wiping the tears from his eyes, my arms around his neck.. I would never again want to be far. Then I woke up with a heavy he...

These past years I have been having this talk with my best friend about the meaning of my life. Why am I here? Why do I feel useless all the time? Have I been doing things that make this world a better place to live? Or have I become an ignorance grown up instead? I wake up each morning, having my daily breakfast with bread and coffee, then go to work. I do what I have to do, being busy all day, getting all chatty with colleagues, sometimes I jog, sometimes I hang out and have some drinks with friends, sometimes I go straight home out of exhaustion, and most of the time.. I feel nothing. I help none, I make zero effort to make this world a better place to live. It makes me feel so worthless, hopeless, and sad. My life has no meaning, and when I die, I die for nothing. Death is a friend of mine, I think about it all the time. It used to scared the shit out of me at first, but I started to get used to the idea of stop living . It somehow can sound better than anything mundane I ...