Yellow Roman Candles

2018

If 2018 was made into a film, it would begin where it almost ends.

The first scene would be a shot of empty street of Jakarta two days to New Year’s Eve where almost everyone is running away to Anywhere But Here destination. Except for the few, with whatever’s reason they chose to stay, or mostly not knowing where to go at all.

Andra, Dydy and I were the few. Sitting on a small Iga Penyet Restaurant somewhere in South Jakarta on a fervent Sunday noon, we spoiled ourselves with cold Coconut drinks and spicy food. Under the sun, my body felt like a dried crackers and so did everything else. I was quiet, as if I was still waking up from a hangover but this time, I hadn’t been drinking at all.

I remember I was stirring my drinks as I felt the slippery handle on the porcelain glass when Andra said, “Actually,” she took a brief pause while exchanging looks with Dydy, “there is a reason why we invited you for lunch.” Just in cue, from across the table Dydy pulled out a white paper bag.

She handed me over a book, You, Me and Five Bucks, with Ethan Hawke and streets of Bournemouth photos on the cover. That’s my blog! I thought.

“So, for your birthday present we curated few of your writings on your blog and made it into a book, which coincidentally marks the 10th anniversary of your blog as you started it when you were 16, and now you’re 26!”

My mouth hung open. I tried to cover it with both of my hands but I felt like I could not stop me from dissolving into tiny molecules. I could’ve screamed, or cry, or laugh, or say thank you, or hug them but not sure what it was, I just sat there with my mouth open and thought, this must’ve what it felt like to hold a baby when I had the book on my hands.

The back cover said: ‘you scare me, not in a ghostly way, but in a everything-is-temporary-and-you-have-to-make-it-count. How mortal everything is. That I have to make the greatest out of the time I have.’ I stopped and stared back to them and squinted my eyebrows, “Are you sure I really wrote this?”

They laughed as they nodded, but my eyes were getting warm and damp.

The narrator inside my head had leaned over the wall and took a deep, long breath, “How could you forget all of this? Not this, this, but this your love towards this, and these people who had put all of their chips in believing you?”

I wasn’t sure what was the answer to that but it just hit me, funny how often we got blinded by the monstrous self-doubt and fear, we were unable to see the love as big and sincere as this, it felt beautiful. The great feeling of being loved, and of loving something so passionately.

Then the scene would shift into a close up shot into my eyes, and montage of flashbacks the days in 2018 that were screaming paragraphs of stories. Like that summer, I was reunited with Marta in Singapore and we sat at a Jazz bar with blue neon lights 2 in the morning with another friend of her, talking about how vast the world is and still connected across the ocean.

And those days when my whole extended family went for a road trip across Central and East Java, convoyed with five cars and there were few nights my cousins and I sneaked out away from our parents in the middle of the night to find a local 24-hour coffee shop to have a bit of fun because the night was still young and the city was too alive to be missed.

Also, last November, when my best friends and I did a quick getaway to Bandung just a few days before my 26th birthday and met a group of strangers with the same taste in music, which we ended up doing a four-hour long karaoke session with them, singing our lungs out, re-living the glorious days of emo songs while having the whole bar for ourselves.

But I had let it dissolve into steam and just images in my phone’s gallery, not being able to process that and write it all down. I know the absence of light often overpowers the days when it actually shines. I was so close in summarising 2018 as a grey weather that looks about to rain but never does. But guess what, in the last two days, it rained! The kind of rain where it mesmerises you to stare outside the window for so long and makes you think how beautiful the Mother Nature is.

For this, I feel like I owe myself an apology: I am so sorry for being so indifferent, apathetic, so passive, when I could have fought harder in all of this. Quoting the great American rock band, Paramore, lyrics in which I wept throughout the song when they played it live in Jakarta last August: Hold onto hope if you got it / Don’t let it go for nobody / And they say that dreaming is free / But I wouldn’t care what it cost me

So, to my future self, I’d just like to let you know, I am holding on tighter than ever and I promise I won’t let it go. With this, I too, have lit the Roman candles again that Kerouac once said to stay mad: mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time.

After everything else had sunk in, the scene would return to the Restaurant. I took a deep breath, and placed down my book next to the glass. I stood up and walked to Andra and Dydy and hug them tight. Had Aysha, too, on the phone and I thanked her for the tiny push that I needed most.

Then the screen faded out into a brief glimpse of New Year’s Eve cheers: to new beginnings, to more stories to write, to all places we will go, and most of all, to more glasses of wine!