Hello,
Thank you again for subscribing. Thank you for allowing me the space to practice writing honestly. I’ve been wanting to connect with people and to share my life stories meaningfully, but I never had the courage. Nevertheless, my favorite kind of writing is finding the extraordinary in the ordinary; and I have always aspired to write a memoir. There’s no time like today, right?
So here is the first story. I’m sending it on a Sunday morning so you can enjoy it with your brunch; or later with your afternoon tea if you choose to. Yes, it’s long, the way I’ve always wanted to write it. Don’t you just want to go on a journey sometimes when you read?
I hope this one makes you smile. Please let me know if you like it.
Have a great Sunday! 💛
Everything went downhill after my father got sacked from his job during the 1998 monetary crisis. To make ends meet, my father, his siblings, and his friends got together and had a cafe business for a while. They named it Taman Kafe. They took a small patch of square on the empty lot next to the unfinished Jaya building construction in sector 7 of Bintaro Jaya. Both Taman Kafe and the building no longer exist today.
The adults cooked and served, while we, the children, flew kites on the grass field of the outdoor cafe. Every weekend there were live top 40 bands. I didn't know exactly how tight the money situation was, my parents never talked to the kids about it, but for 11 year-old me that period of my life felt like a family party. Until the cafe caught fire and we were back to square one.
Then we struggled a lot, money-wise. My grandma and aunts had to bail my dad every time. They paid for our school supplies and tuition fees. I honestly felt like I was going to drop out of school because we could no longer afford it. Eventually, it was decided that the family was going to move back to Palembang so dad could take the only job available to him at the time, which was to continue my late grandpa's hospitality business.
I dreaded it. They were asking me to leave my friends in SLTP Pembangunan Jaya and my life in Bintaro for Palembang, where nothing ever happened. I lived in Palembang as a balita and I remembered the city was not exciting. Fortunately for me, I was in 7th grade then and they already paid millions of uang pangkal. If I moved with them, they're gonna have to put me in a new junior high school and paid millions of uang pangkal all over again. So I stayed with my aunt while my father, mother, younger brother, and younger sister flew to Palembang. And I started living on borrowed time.
The plan was always to wait until I finished junior high. Then I'd join my family in Palembang. I think my sense of time was botched, because junior high graduation felt so far away. Good for me, it made me enjoy my remaining years with my friends fully. The moving only got real when my parents flew me to Palembang to attend the enrolling test at my potential future high school. It was a huge school. I felt really small.
I didn't try very hard on the test, but I got in anyway. As soon as junior high was done, I packed my bags, went to the airport with a bunch of my friends, and flew to Palembang.
I stepped into SMA Xaverius I Palembang for a three-day mandatory school orientation. You know the drill. They asked you to tie your hair in ridiculous ponytails, took you around the school, and told you to collect the upperclassmen's signatures so you could get to know each other. I expected the worst out of the situation because I knew no one and I stood out in so many ways.
Xaverius I was a Catholic school. The majority of the students were Chinese-Indonesians. Brown faces were obvious. My junior high uniform was also loudly announcing that I wasn't from Palembang. Then it got even more obvious when I talked, because I spoke in an accent-less Jakarta dialect. My classmates were in awe. They said I sounded like an actor on television. It was embarrassing.
So I kept my mouth shut unless I was spoken to. Not knowing anyone, I sat on my desk and waited for school to start. There weren't many people in the classroom. A lot of the kids were hanging out with the friends they went to junior high with. There was one student though sleeping in the class. Unlike us new kids, she was wearing putih abu-abu. My first thought was, "Wah, nggak naik kelas, nih." Then she woke up and saw me.
She looked at my uniform then introduced herself as Shitta in a flawless Jakarta dialect. I got excited. Maybe Shitta was from Jakarta like me. I was grateful she'd talked to me first.
So Shitta was in 11th grade. That stopped me a bit, realizing she was a kakak kelas. I didn’t know what the code of conduct in Palembang was, but in Jakarta gencetan was common among high schoolers. She told me she didn't attend orientation the first time so this year they made her do it. She didn't really care much about it because by then the student government elites were her friends. She told me a lot about the school and what to expect from the orientation. "MOS-nya santai, kok. Paling nanti kamu dimarah-marahin dikit sama anak-anak Paskib pas baris."
It didn't make me feel better but I was grateful for the heads up. Moreover, I was relieved that she treated me like an old friend. She said I looked familiar, and I said how? If this was another TV actor joke, I swear to god.
"Kita satu sekolah nggak sih pas SD?" she asked. I stared at her. I told her I went to an elementary school in Bintaro. Did she go there too? She said no; she had always been in Palembang.
"Tapi aku tahu kok sekolah kamu. Kamu sekolah di PJ, kan? Aku punya teman di PJ, namanya Bimo*. Kenal nggak?"
I lit up. I knew Bimo. He was my upperclassman in junior high. He was a nerd and a huge teddy bear, it was hard to miss him. Sometimes I talked anime with him. Shitta said she went to school with Bimo, they were good friends before he moved to Jakarta. I thought maybe that was how Shitta had heard of my junior high school. She still insisted that she and I went to the same elementary school, but I knew I met her for the first time that morning in Xaverius I. I was sure she remembered it wrong and didn't pursue it any further.
And that was how I knew Shitta. She was my first friend in this new place, who introduced me further to her upperclassmen friends. Even so, Shitta and I didn't really hang out much in high school. Not only we were in different grades, but we also had different interests. Later on, I also began to find my own friends. In the beginning, we still talked a bit, because my friend had a huge crush on Shitta's friend. But after the crush faded away, we were busy with our own thing.
One day, Shitta graduated and went to a university in Bandung. We lost contact and I never heard from her again. I didn't think too much about it, because I thought it was a natural course of life to drift apart post-graduation, the way I drifted apart from my junior high friends. A year later, I graduated too. High school was no longer and I finally got what I'd always wanted: moving back to Jakarta.
Well, not really Jakarta. I went to Depok to attend law school. My junior high friends, some of them attended the same university in Depok, they helped me to find a kos-kosan and settle down. I was grateful for our friendship and junior high rapport because I realized then that I was feeling as lost as I was when I just moved to Palembang. However, I realized that despite the shared history, my junior high friends and I had become different people. They still invited me to events, and I still knew all of their faces, but it just wasn't the same. Most of them went to the same high school and I wasn't privy to their inside jokes. I just had to accept that with them, I could never continue where we left off. So I found new friends in law school and I had my own thing. And I had my first boyfriend.
Let's just call him Rizky* as a joke, because he was more of a cobaan rather than a rezeki to me haha but you have to understand. I was a mahasiswa baru, catching up on Jabodetabek culture after spending three years in Palembang, where some stuff happened but not a lot. In law school I met a lot of cool people from all over the place, and I felt so behind. I was determined to appear as if I knew what they’re talking about despite hailing from a different island that was not Java. And any attention from the seniors made me feel special.
Almost right from the get go, I became heavily involved in campus politics. I joined an extra-campus organization and that was how I knew Rizky. We spent a lot of time together as we schemed and strategized on winning elections and spreading our ideology in campus. At the time I thought he was so dashing and smart. He also drove his own car. I was enthralled by his authority. I thought it was sexy. He often flirted with me in front of our friends and I just smiled awkwardly, not knowing how to flirt back. Our friends teased us endlessly.
In my third semester, it was Rizky's fifth, we officially dated. We both held positions in campus and he was gunning for the executive chair. It was brief, but it was enough to make me feel like we were a power couple in campus. The things I aspired to be (cringe).
During our relationship, Rizky introduced me to his long time friend, Iman Sjafei. Apparently, Rizky spent a few school years in Palembang and that was how he knew Iman. I found out that Iman and I were even neighbors in Palembang, our homes were just several steps away from each other. I didn’t know him because he went to SMAN 17, the best public high school in Palembang at the time. Oh, I knew that school. I used to have a crush on a member of 17's Paskibra team. Furthermore, I also found out that Iman was good friends with Shitta. Now that was a name I haven't heard in a very long time. They still kept in touch with each other. So we made plans to meet when Shitta came to Jakarta.
I was fascinated. I went all the way to Depok only to find people from home again. It didn't take long for Iman and I to be good friends.
Iman was the person I went to when my relationship with Rizky started to rock. Since the beginning of the relationship I'd never felt like I formed any secure attachment with him, so our honeymoon period was very brief. Most of the months in our relationship were filled with me getting more and more anxious as I felt him growing more and more distant. We rarely went on dates because we met almost every day at campus. But I desperately wanted to spend quality time together. I can’t even remember if we ever went on a movie date, just the two of us.
One weekend I asked Rizky to come over so we could hang out with each other. He said he couldn't, he had stuff to do. I was hurt, but I thought giving him that space was what a cool girlfriend would do. I spent the day alone in my kos-kosan until Iman texted me, telling me that he was hanging out with Rizky in Kemang. Iman asked why I wasn't there. And that hurt a lot. I felt so abandoned by my boyfriend who kept sidelining me from his life like this. So I cried and cried until my head hurt. That day I realized I was fed up with crying. I wanted the pain to stop. I didn't wait to meet him at school. I called him and broke up with him. He didn't resist.
I wish it ended there, but it took me a very long time to heal from that relationship. Especially when a week after we broke up, Rizky found himself a new girlfriend. She was my junior, a strong-headed girl. Iman often told me about how she overpowered Rizky in the relationship. I didn't ask him to tell me but I was glad for the laughs we got from it.
Knowing that I really had to move on, I stopped attending the extra-campus organization that had Rizky in it. I also withdrew from campus politics. In fact, life quickly led me to K-Pop instead. That kept me so busy.
Rizky and I barely talked anymore. But I remained good friends with Iman; and I was glad our friendship grew beyond the person that introduced us in the first place.
After that Shitta came to Jakarta, and we met as planned. I hadn't met her since she left high school. She had blossomed into this young woman she was always meant to be and I saw her with some kind of awe. I wish I was more like her, so confident and pretty.
We talked about the funny chains of events that put Shitta, Iman, and me right then and there. It still felt fascinating to know that we came from the same place. I told Iman about how Shitta and I went to the same high school. Then Shitta said she and I actually went way further back than that, that we knew each other from elementary school.
I looked at her in confusion because there was no way. But then I recalled our first conversation in high school and I admitted it was still a mystery how both of us could know Bimo. Iman got excited at the problem and declared that the only way to know the answer was to hear it from Bimo himself.
We immediately went to Facebook looking for Bimo. It was a long shot. I thought there was no way we could find him; let alone get him to solve this mystery for us once for all. But we found his Facebook profile. His profile picture looked like the boy I remember, but older. We sent him a message, asking if he still remembered us. Then I guess we just had to wait. I expected he would reply a few days later, if he replied at all.
However, Bimo replied our message almost immediately. He said he remembered us. Shitta and I screamed. We urgently told him that he had to help us with this problem. He agreed to meet us that very day at Citos.
While we waited for Bimo, I was starting to wonder could this be the same Bimo that Shitta and I knew before high school. What if they just happened to have the same name? But then the guy we messaged stepped into the restaurant and there was no mistaking it. The glasses he wore, his big stature, his voice. This was Bimo, my upperclassman in PJ. I looked at Shitta and she confirmed that this was the Bimo she went to school with.
Bimo sat between us at the hot seat. It was a bit awkward but we remembered how he tended to avoid eye-contact during conversations. This was really the Bimo we both knew.
We asked how he was, as it was the polite thing to do. He said he was busy running a dog-walking business. It was so cute. He got so passionate when he talked about the dogs he walked. When that was done, we got to the main agenda.
We asked him if he remembered me and Shitta and he said yes, he did remember us. We asked if he remembered us separately, he said he wasn't sure. So we asked the obvious questions. Did he go to PJ for junior high? He said yes. Did he ever live in Palembang? He said he wasn't sure, but he thought he lived in a daerah somewhere when he was little, maybe that was Palembang. Alright, inconclusive, but okay. At least, could he say for sure then that he went to school with Shitta? He said he couldn't. But he did remember Shitta. And that was that.
It was anti-climatic, confusing, and impossible, but there we were. Hearing Bimo's account, Shitta believed even more that at one point in our lives, she, Bimo, and I went to school together. But I strongly disagreed. I had the report book to prove that I spent six years of elementary school in Bintaro. Shitta thought I remembered it wrong. I thought she remembered it wrong. How would we know who's wrong? Is it possible for two souls who never physically meet recognize each other when they finally do?
That was the only time we ever met Bimo. After that he disappeared again from our lives. I wonder how he and his dog-walking business are doing. As for Shitta and I, we didn't know how to solve this mystery so we left it at that. We've sort of agreed to disagree, that we both remember different things.
The sweet thing is, Shitta, Iman, and I are still friends until today. I'd like to think this little moment we shared at Citos had become one of the many molecules that kept our friendship together for so many years (another molecule is we love to make fun of Rizky). We never brought up this problem again; it would only give us a headache.
Later I remembered that there was a brief period of time I went to SD Xaverius Palembang when I was five. Very brief, I never even got to receive any report card from that school. There were many Xaverius schools in Palembang, I don't remember exactly which Xaverius elementary I went to. I only attended the school for a few months before my father took me to Jakarta. I don't even remember if I made any friends there. I only remembered participating in the school-wide aerobic event and then grandma picked me home. I'm pretty sure I didn't make any friends in the few months I was there. I don't even know if it was the same Xaverius that Shitta attended. But could it be?
So who remembers it wrong?
*Not their real names.
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