Superfluous Thoughts

Chill..?

“…. Who cares? You guys are moving away soon and beside, he’s the only one with a problem. Everyone else is chill.” - Pretty much everyone I’ve talked to. 

Chill, you guys…? Really…!?

What’s so chill about using his name as a barricade (and as an excuse) so that I couldn’t attend the batch’s last opportunity to bond?

What’s so chill about making me the dispensable one just so he can get his way?

What’s so chill about always trying to separate the two of us in different rooms/occasions?

What’s so chill about putting your hands up and saying “I don’t know, san” everytime I come around, asking for an explanation when you guys know exactly what’s going on?

This is our last summer together as a batch, Binus IV. And all I wanted to do was to make it memorable to me personally and to you guys. To my friends. To my teammates for three years. Is that so wrong? But I guess all I can do now is to be grateful for what I’ve got. To take the ‘marbles’ that I currently have and leave before I lose anymore of them.. 

Oh, and thanks for being so chill about everything.. 

Binus IV

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness - but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found in this school, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place. It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team.

When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. Binus is full of tiny circles we pull around ourselves. Tiny groups that make us feel loved and safe and part of something even on our loneliest nights when we stumble home to our computers — partner-less, tired, awake.

This scares me. More than finding the right job or city or spouse – I’m scared of losing this web we’re in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I feel right now. But let us get one thing straight: the best years of our lives are not behind us. They’re part of us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to Jakarta and away from jakarta and wish we did or didn’t live in Jakarta. I plan on having parties when I’m 30. I plan on having fun when I’m old. Any notion of THE BEST years comes from clichéd “should haves…” “if I’d…” “wish I’d…”

Of course, there are things we wished we did: our readings, that girl across the hall. We’re our own hardest critics and it’s easy to let ourselves down. Sleeping too late. Procrastinating. Cutting corners. More than once I’ve looked back on my old self and thought: how did I do that? How did I work so hard? Our private insecurities follow us and will always follow us. But the thing is, we’re all like that.

Nobody wakes up when they want to. Nobody did all of their reading (except maybe the crazy people who win the prizes…) We have these impossibly high standards and we’ll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves. But I feel like that’s okay.

We’re so young. We’re so young. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.