Pecks and The City

Pecks and The City

Jakarta can easily be lonely, perhaps because I’ve always associated it with my friends. Hence, when they’re away, my bubble feels smaller somehow. Tight. Claustrophobic.

I’ve never seen this city as a place where I’d blow my bubbles. Somehow, I only do blow that in certain places — ASEAN, Ciranjang, Asem I. Places where my thoughts can stretch a little further.

Maybe that’s why Jakarta will always feel strange to me. It was never supposed to be the city where I let my bubbles drift.

It isn’t the kind of place where I can sit back, exhale a cloud of vape smoke, and feel at ease. It isn’t Biblioteka, where I once desperately asked a stranger where they bought their vape, somewhere cheaper than the rest of Warsaw.

I’ve never wanted to bring my emotional baggage from home to Jakarta. The city feels too foreign for that, it didn’t deserve that. As though it would absorb the most vulnerable parts of me — the deepest ones — and leave them somewhere I could never retrieve.

No, it isn’t the people who point at me for smoking on the side of the road. It isn’t the man who catcalls me in the alley near Asem I. Fuck those men. I’m immune to them.

As tight as my bubble becomes, I’ve slowly realized it was never them. It wasn’t the traffic either.

It was the city.

The people.

And perhaps the fact that I’ve always decide to not become a part of it, not once, not ever.