SWORDS

Nina Simone, was it And what about God? Nobody can’t take away? or was it  And what about God? Nobody can’t take away. or was it a journey, a question mark turned into a period? One second rest before the refrain, a moment to give that one sentence a chance to linger for one more while in the listeners’ heads. Or, I prefer, a moment of surrender. Until... Dang! I got my hair, I got my head I got my brains, I got my ears I got my eyes, I got my nose I got my mouth, I got my smile I got my tongue, I got my chin I got my neck, I got my boobies I got my heart, I got my soul I got my back, I got my sex I got my arms, I got my hands I got my fingers, I got my legs I got my feet, I got my toes I got my liver, got my blood I got life, I got my life I got my freedom, I got life! Everything begins with nothing, between these two poles is a verb: surrender. And this whole seeing, is beauty. 

I am in the museum of the earth and this all had happened before So long before that I start to forget how it does look like And how it does feel to be in its curves and cuts in its highs and lows The museum ticket costs me a lot, for the experience iss promised to be real And it does feel real So real it feels weird Celebrations and emotions and I even make friends We talk about how weird the tour guide looks when he talks Should we have taken the unguided tour and experience the museum ourselves? Some of my friends have gone after they thought it's enough for the day while I am still in the museum of the earth for old time sake Reminiscing the way the air feels as I try on different feelings It was delightful but some day it has to come to an end What's left is the stories, packed in a giant museum Then we turned into historians of our lives

The only thing stays constant is change, we all have heard of that (if you haven't, now you have). It's as clear as if you're pointing at a tree and telling someone, "it's a tree". But yet seeing that my life is about to change still creeps the hell out of my shivering bones. I know for a fact that many things would change sooner or later, but often my heart gets attached too quickly to certain moments that leaving them would cost me tears or/and uneasy feelings, which sometimes last longer than my mind allowed. Somewhere along my life journey, a month after my 25th birthday, I decided to have my own adress and move into a new place (which I, by the way, feeling very much comfortable in). Everybody who has at least once moved to a new place in their lives knows this last breath they take while looking around the old place, as if the moments ever happened in that place were playing on rewind in their heads. That's the corner where I once spilled the coffee,...

The sakura tree in front of my house starts bloom this time of the year, which is kind of my primary sign to estimate what time of the year I am in this land of four seasons I wasn’t grown up in, in which I sometimes still feel strange.  Nothing much has changed in the outside world since the last spring due to COVID-19, but I am sure there has been a lot going on in the department of emotions and your thinking mind, hasn't it? 

There is nothing much preferably done in winter than waking up between 11 to 12 AM to a warm cup of coffee without thinking it as one of the greatest guilty pleasures in life.  To be sorry is a very humble thing, but I wonder if it's at all necessary. To never feel sorry or to never having to say sorry might very well be a good challenge to take on as a new year resolution, which comes soon enough to be pressure. It might not be as hard if you just hear it once, but to never have to say "sorry" requires you to be always right and to be always right means not more than to never do wrong and there are two ways to never do wrong in life: 1. To behave just exactly the way society expects you to behave 2. To never regret every little detail that you decide to do The latest one has somehow made its way to be "in" nowadays, mostly in the West. I personally think that this is a beautiful way to live the life. Nevertheless, a tricky one because we tend to forget the reas...

It's safe to say that 2020 is one of the most depressing years all time, at least that's the impression I get from social medias and some conversations with people around me - and this isn't only because of COVID-19 which definitely limit our free wills. Happiness or gratitude suddenly become the things that we need to look for, because it doesn't happen just-like-that anymore. So, instead of waiting for good things to happen, we are forced to create or look for them. "What makes you happy?" ...was the question I hope I could answer with a list of activities. After realizing that it I could not begin with anything, the question reformulates itself into... "What used to make you happy?" Maybe that's the question I should start with.  Of course I (or we all) am not always this gloomy. We were all once those kids whose good moods could be triggered simply by cotton candies or playgrounds. The cotton candies now have turned into carb diets and the pl...

  On my latest trip to Amsterdam, I saw I guy singing while he was riding his bike through the streets in a crowded city of Amsterdam. After wondering how it feels to have that kind of self-consciousness, I started to wonder, how would a person like that handle a heartbreak? This blog contains a lot of heartbreaks. I’ve been blogging for about 10 years and have shared a lot of my personal heartbreaks and those of people around me in this blog of mine. Not always directly “you guys, my heart’s broken”, sometimes in other forms: stories, poems, or even happy poems and happy stories. Through those years, I acknowledged that heartbreak has a wider spectrum. It could happen not always in a relationship, but also in losing a friend, in hormonal changes, in rejections, in being totally afraid of not knowing what could happen next, in a massive confusion about life and all the possible meanings it may have. Not only that, heartbreaks also showed me that it’s not about how heartbroken I am....

I was often told of Kalong Wewe back when I was a kid. I have never seen a Kalong Wewe but this Kalong Wewe should be an old and mean witch, who liked to kidnap children. Kalong Wewe would start to look for children as the sun goes down. That was how "go home before dark" became one of the most important rule for the children, at least, in my neighborhood. Little did I know, in Japan, especially in public places, there's a song that will be played at the same time everyday as a reminder for the children that's it's late, and that it is time to go home. Is it not a very beautiful thing, to have someone/something telling you, that it is enough for today, that it's time to come home?

In the heart of Europe, a little bit to the south, I am typing this. Correction: I am typing and deleting this, typing and deleting this, typing and deleting this. This is one of those posts which have occupied my drafts for the last few months. Each word in this post has been trying to find a meaning they can call their own but sometimes things just don’t work that way.  Everything would be easier if we were all able to talk through our feelings, through no words. Words were made to limit us, I once read. But with no words, there would be no ambiguities and misunderstandings. And, come on, ambiguities and misunderstandings, at many points, often also trigger us to develop. So, what’s the limit anyway? I am writing this mostly because of my upcoming birthday. Birthdays are always filled with questions. The questions use to change from “what present do I get for my birthday?” to “what have I achieved up to this birthday?” We also change the address we send the questions to,...

Dahulu kala semesta diciptakan bersamaan dengan dua roh agung Siwarka dan Sakwari. Siwarka dapat bernyanyi dengan indah tiada tara, namun diciptakan tanpa indera pendengaran. Sementara Sakwari diciptakan bisu, namun memiliki pendengaran yang begitu hebat hingga dapat mendengar suara hingga yang paling lembut sekalipun. Sains hari ini mengelompokkan suara ke dalam tiga frekuensi; ultrasonik, audiosonik, dan infrasonik, dimana satu jenis spesies makhluk hidup hanya bisa mendengar salah satunya. Sakwari mendengar suara dalam frekuensi apapun, bahkan yang gelombangnya dapat menembus semua jenis alam. Sedangkan Siwarka, mengenali nada dan irama lewat getaran. Dari getarannya, ia ciptakan dan ia mainkan melodi yang paling indah yang siapapun bisa dengar. Siwarka dilahirkan di satu belahan semesta, sementara Sakwari di satu belahan lainnya, jaraknya mungkin berabad-abad, atau lebih. Siwarka tidak tahu dimana Sakwari, begitu juga Sakwari tidak tahu dimana Siwarka. Tapi dengan cara yang ta...