I’m writing this post in silence. Literally, I can not hear anything outside of my bedroom. It was really unusually quiet, made me too restless to fall asleep. My place is located on the big street and the  street noises are already became the part of my room, along with the tapping water sound from my bathroom, the ticking of wall clock, cars and motorcycles passing by, all integrated like music.

Still in the holiday mode of Lebaran, Moslem’s Idhul Fitri day after a month fasting. Where once a year Jakarta is dead, most people working in Jakarta goes back to their home outside the city or in another island. About 10 days is very silent, while everybody is busy with their family celebrating, visiting their relatives, family and friends. My family is Buddhist and we have been indifferent with these celebrations by being a minority for decades. Buddhist only celebrate Waisak, which is only in Indonesia, and it’s only one day marked red in a calendar. But most people don’t bother to say Happy Waisak anyway since it was too minor.

I have been away for three years and this was the first time again I experienced the whole month in the city.

I was thinking that I feel like being in New York city on Christmas eve once again, without any family and friends, and you’re not celebrating. You have to work the next day so you can’t escape the city. Have  no money to buy yourself a decent Christmas dinner. Feeling left out. Alone. Is all I can think about. Indonesia is all about family based, friends oriented, spouse addicted… when it is time for holiday, there’s no doubt that being alone in this city becomes truly unbearable.

It was one of the reason that my friend left this city for vacation this lebaran. Once he said the fact that living in this city, solitude is a strange thing. He was a bule, had no idea why he kept seeing his Indo girlfriend. She was of course pretty, sexy, keeps him company, speaks little English, does whatever he told her and has no real job. When he tried to ditch her, she cried like a baby and he felt like the total asshole, felt the unbearable loneliness few days after that and ended up calling her again.

You had to have someone with you in this city, it’s either because there’s really nothing much to do or not many interesting places to go? You keep meeting the same people after few weeks you live here in Jakarta. If you bumped at a friend at some shopping center and she would greet -not with how are you?- but asked who are you with, where do you go? where were you from before? that is general questions for Indonesian which many of westerners would say- well, fuck off, mind your own business- in return.

If you ever been in this situation, if you are happened to be alone- which you most likely would, you can lie that you were there with someone but he’s in the bathroom of really bad diarrhea or pretend not to see your friend and hide between the fake plants.

I love to go alone and the other day I went to the cinema at some dodgy old plaza in China town, a place I know that no one else will know me there, bought ticket at the last minute and sat quietly in the theater. I glanced at the people in my row, I saw an empty seat, an older woman probably in her 40s alone, empty seat again and at the end of the row, another pretty woman alone in her late 20s. I smiled and knowing that I was not really alone, I felt somehow warm in my heart.

Yes. I think I can manage another day without him until I found my other half.

“Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness is a story” like Tolstoy said.