About Home
On settling, for now
In October 2022, I told the guy I was seeing that I needed to find a new place to live. At the time, I was living in a studio apartment in Semanggi, with a month left on my lease. He then told me that he had a friend who owned several apartment units in an older building, also in Semanggi, and was looking for tenants for one of her empty units. I have been to the building - it was one of the older and more expensive apartments. One of the towers is a hotel. The units in this building are mostly two to three bedrooms, which is why this building is occupied by mostly families instead of twenty year old single people like me. It was way beyond my price range for an apartment, but we checked the apartment anyway.
It was a rainy Thursday afternoon. I remember it being a Thursday because I vividly remember the batik shirt he was wearing - and would later on take off. The apartment was huge. I don’t know if it was something about the new paint, the clean new furniture, the spacious living room, and the view from the 19th floor, or the fact that I was checking this apartment with a guy of my dreams - every corner of the building was birthing delusional romantic scenarios, but I fell in love with the place. I remember thinking, I have to live here. I remember this emptiness I felt when we had to go back to my studio that day - the disgust I had for myself and the life I was living. The dusty floor, the unmade bed where we just had sex, the air conditioner that needed fixing, the dirty dish in my sink - so lifeless, passionless, childish. I needed to move out.
Across the city, my best friends Aza and Abdan were in the process of moving out from their old apartment in Thamrin. I told them about the apartment and the possibility of us living together. Luck is on my side. They loved the place as much as I did, and by the end of that month, we had already moved in. Boxes of clothes and trinkets piled up in the living room on the day we moved in. A new start for all of us.
The funny thing is, I stopped seeing the guy not long after that. Which one is funnier: that I live in this apartment that I’m living in now because a guy I was seeing two years ago knew someone who owns this apartment, or that I no longer speak to this guy?
I have been living here for two years now. We have come accustomed to calling it “Ardut”. In the two years we have lived here, the apartment has become our own Monica’s Apartment. We hosted parties - many kinds of it. New Years, birthdays, pre-drinking, post-clubbing, movie nights. Our friends come when they have nowhere to go. Our sofa has been a bed for many of our friends.
There have been other guys, too. Some were dreamier than the others. Some slept on my bed. Some spoke to my friends and some left before they saw my friends. Some talked to me about the pile of books on the table in my room and some talked about the pictures on my wall.
I remember a specific time of the year at home - somewhere in late December or early January, where it rains every day (to tell you the truth, stories like this always take place in late December or early January where it rains every day). I was sitting on the sofa watching a pirated movie. The cats, Salem and Leo, were playing fights on the carpet. My work dissipated as the holidays crept in - my only thought was how I was going to spend the days between Christmas and New Year. I was mostly alone - on holidays my friends were either in Bali or doing something somewhere. On some of these days, friends would come, mostly to spend the days doing nothing as well. It was the frozen time - the disconnected reality of my home and the rest of the world during this time that made me feel grounded. I began to realize that this was home. It wasn’t just a place for me to sleep, it was a place for me to live - live live.
I have been a stranger to the idea of home. The physicality of it, at least. For the longest time, home to me was the blue-painted room where I spent most nights crying myself to sleep, where the only time I felt safe was when I looked at the world through my computer screen, where I wished to leave one day, and where I decided to leave one day. Then home was a room with really big windows in a continent thousand kilometers away where I had to learn how to be by myself. The idea of home was a little too complicated to form after that - maybe because I move a lot, but here is what I know: home is where it’s warm. It’s where I can invite my friends over just to be with each other. It’s where I feel the safest. It’s where I can hide from the rest of the world when I no longer have the energy to face it.
I am afraid of calling a place my home. Living as a twenty something is fast-paced - everything moves so fast and there is nothing permanent. I have been living here for two years, that’s the longest I’ve lived in a place, but who knows where I will be next year? I think this fear has never really cemented my sense of belonging, and that day - some time between December and January, I was just a little brave enough to take it all in. This is home. For now, at least.
love your writing!!!