Before Ayah died my biggest reason to live is to experience a traditional Javanese wedding that he lead. He will tell our life’s story in his mother tongue because he’s still one of the best storytellers I know. He will shake the hand of the man I will marry and drive 12 hours to help solve a problem that occurs later on. This dream, of course, is buried with him.
After he died I struggle to find another big reason to live. I know my friends have theirs; to be rich, to be famous, to create things that move people, to travel the world, to build a family. I don’t think I will find any new ones until today I realized that my biggest reason to live is to live.
My biggest reason to live is to be miserable every time something reminds me of Ayah, about the past I took for granted and the future we never get to experience. My biggest reason to live is to hit the newest low every time. To throw up in a ditch on the side of the road because I smoked way too much. To stop talking to everyone for days. To interrupt a meeting with a booked therapy session. To cry in the middle of brainstorms and reviews, confusing everyone. To be a bad friend because I have zero energy left for empathy despite my friends are dying for help. To let myself be a bad employee and a bad friend. To live with the awkward grief my mother and I hide from each other. To wish I can cry in her arms and tell her that it’s okay to not be cheerful every time but she will do it anyway.
To resort to films — good ones and bad ones — and live different lives for two and a half hours each time. To spend my money catching festivals and buying books on grief which probably only makes things worse for me to handle. To not know what to do but decide to wing it anyway. To listen to the same songs I’ve been listening to since 2014. To stop watching a film before it ends because I’m too tired to finish it. To write only when something is pushing to come out as Bukowski said, and forgive myself for not always having something to say about everything. To write bad pieces 1000 times but have fun with it. To want to draw again but never did, to want to learn musical instruments but never did, to want to exercise regularly but never did.
To spend money on things that look cute. To fall in love all over again with the same guy for the past 7 years but never had the guts to tell him. To cry about work, cry about wedding videos, cry about anything Japan-related, cry about anime characters, cry about feeling lonely. To log one film on Letterboxd every day and log one book on Goodreads every month. To wake up each day just to finish work as fast as I can so I have more time to watch people’s instastory and tiktok videos. To rewatch every Wong Kar Wai film for the 12th time and turn them into my personality trait, like Murakami books and Sylvia Plath’s entire works. To rewatch Drive My Car and The Worst Person in the World all over again. To finally watch films about womanhood I’ve been too scared to watch. To be angry about things people mock girls for by calling us gender police.
To build a family from scratch and live in agony in the process. To worry about money and about climate disasters and the possibility of having a child. To have pregnancy scares. To count 40 days before Ramadan before getting drunk. To always wanting to travel but never have the courage to actually go anywhere. To take trips to Asian groceries, try adventurous foods, and try every peach-flavored everything.
I don’t have one thing I devote my entire life to. I have come to terms that I live a boring life as a boring person. My entire life I’ve been the person in the background, holding a can of beer because everyone does it (I don’t even like beer) as the cool written-by-a-woman main character is having a moment dancing to David Bowie on the dancefloor, and I am good at it. So maybe I don’t need one big reason to live. Today I live to grief the death of my emotionally distant Ayah and regret how I made him feel lonely before he died, tomorrow I will live to write a manifesto for a sketchy pinjol that I hate, and the day after that I will live to stay on my bed and cry all night. This list will continue to grow, and that’s a good enough reason to carry on.
