Truth claim

i haven’t updated thetruthaboutjakarta for many reasons. most of them i don’t want to discuss with you. safe to say i’ve been away from life as i know it. i’m on an overgrown path edged with brambles, going nowhere. i don’t mind. i’ve been taking siestas in empty pasanggrahans, unkempt, deserted by travelers even. no one likes hanging out anymore. just sitting in kroessi males all afternoon. no one sees the point in writing letters in english anymore. make the gestures of writing with your hands, and no one would understand. i’ve been reading many books in my dreams. more and more wiliams, p.a. daum, e. breton de nijs, albert alberts, anything indische belletrice. i think the spelling is wrong but i’ll let subagjo have it this time. i don’t have time to talk to you anymore. i have my suspicions. no, i never suspected you, but i should never have trusted anyone, least of all myself. we have lost our rohani, and i’m trying to replace it with tales of things, with a tokai cigarette lighter as their serial protagonist. i long for a late afternoon with a baskin&robbins mixed flavors sky, but everywhere around me is night. goodbye.

you’re harsh on me for a reason i know. your own reasons. i’ve got nothing to do with whatever person you’ve decided to be. perhaps you decided it one night in lhokseumawe, while waiting for someone to crush your panadol extras for you in your teaspoon. and you didn’t have water, only cold oversweet tea. get on with it. get on with life. as you would’ve said to me, i bet you would’ve said those words to me. you have. if i told you, that i too had decided on the person, the ideal man, i wanted to be three years ago and now i find myself staring at the same ceiling i was staring at three years ago to the second, would you believe me? i have not moved an inch. time to rearrange the furnitures in my room. no one has been rocking in the rocking chair for many years, perhaps it’s time to put rocking to pasture. would you believe it.

i’m trying to make you into my new muse. but you’re whipping me into shapes i hate. the shadow painting of a rasta’s head, a fender strat, thick ankles. you’re not letting me be who i am o muse nouvelle!, i hate you. i hate you but i love you, because your hate is new. your disgust at my reluctance to stand under the cold mountain water pouring out of the bamboo pipe, your short, curt answers to my self-imposed problems of amour, your secretly texting your friends to pick you up so you can get away from the possibility of spending the night with me. you’re cleverer than all my old muses, that’s what i like about you. in this country, i’d kill for clever. now the struggle, which, of course you would suggest, doesn’t really have to be one, is to find a way to feel the heat of your skin against mine. period.