#queit

“Breath"

All I can hear is my own breath. It’s shallow and soft, but it sounds heavy and labored to me. My heartbeat pounds in my ears. I guess that’s two things I can hear. They’re deafening to me now.

I want to scream just to know I can, but something deep inside tells me I shouldn’t and grips at my vocal cords.

These decrepit halls of rust and steam should be louder. There should be hissing and rattling of pipes, drops of leaking water, and echoing of things falling apart. But all I can hear is myself. How did I get here again?

The sound of my own footsteps give me away. With every sound I make, I feel something looming nearby, coming just a little closer. I check behind me—nothing—and then soften and slow my careful footsteps.

The moist scent of stale rust catches in my throat. I want to gag, to choke and cough, but I stifle the impulse with a hand over my mouth. I can feel every crinkle of the folds of my clothes as I move.

I slowly peek around every corner and every doorway not closed or blocked off. I check behind me again and again and again and again. The halls are empty. Which way was I going?

The quieter it becomes, the quieter I try to stay.

My breath feels heavy, my pulse feels louder than my footsteps. Are they echoing in hall?

It’s so many things to make who truly I am. One of things is when I read book. Even it’s just a book, it was healing me. I can no longer have conversation with others. I just focused on what I concern, because we’re often coming at it from completely different places. I can’t have a conversation with them about the details a problem if they don’t even recognise that the problem exists. Worse still is the person who might be willing to entertain the possibility of said fairness, but who thinks we enter this conversation as equals. I don’t.

What I wasn’t expecting was an outpouring of emotion from people who felt that by deciding to stop talking to people about race, I was taking something away from the world, and that this was an absolutely tragedy in good way. ‘Heartbreaking’ seemed to be the word that best described this condition.

My dream is that the people who turn up to my events take that opportunity to meet each others, swap details and form their local resistance.This month, I read (and not yet finish) “Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People about Race” by Reni Eddo-Lodge when I am in chapter 5, it’s about the feminism question. I took poet by black feminism, her name is Audre Lorde. She said ‘your silence will not protect you’. Who wins when we don’t speak? Not us.

Many question comes to me. It is good thing which occasionally will pervasive to my self, sometimes it will be arose aggravation. Aggravation depends on point of view of their questions. Therefore, I lived in Indonesia which eastern culture is too hip. Everything based on your ethnic, religion and so on. Your personal life will be consumed to other people. They want to know what you’ve done. They are so noisy with many perspective of your life.

I felt like everywhere, public opinion was veering towards hostility. The drawbridges came up and the atmosphere turned sharp. Every country was full, and every country had to look after their own. The world had turned inward. Politics had become punitive, rather than empathetic and generous. Refugees were dying in capsized dinghy boats in the mediterranean sea, and populist politics told us not only to look away, but somehow that people fleeing war and poverty did not need our help. We were too stretched.

Last year I had been a lot of things: humbling, elating, upsetting, overwhelming. Sometimes all the same time. It was also one of the most formatives years of my life, one where i felt like I became a fuller human being with a little bit more compassion, self-awareness and less anger. Against my wish, however, the moments keep fleeting before I could properly imprint them in my memory (taking pictures helps, of course, although it often gets too interruptive and energy consuming).

Flash news: I’m Leslie Knope (from Parks and Recreation) or at least that’s how I think of myself. In one of episodes, Leslie sat down with her boss Ron Swanson, who reminded her to never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing. While I don’t know if I could ever whole-ass one thing, this year I accomplished the difficult task of reducing my urge to “multiplieth-ass tons of things” to just “whole ass-two things”.