I’m feeling nostalgia now for things that I have not left, a feeling I don’t like, because it means part of me is already gone, not present. Even in the mall in Semarang, a gleaming noisy place full of expensive shops and over-priced, for Indonesia, food, I look around with a wistfulness and affection that can easily overpower me. I hate that mall, and still I am missing it in the midst of my consumer animus. I drive the road from Semarang, between the kilometer-long bamboo huts selling woks (some tiny, some big enough to stir-fry a large toddler, whole) and I miss it already. How strange, this feeling, to miss in advance what you still have. It’s like that unpleasant sensation of worrying about the death of a loved one who is with you, and still healthy. Only we have to go in three weeks, on June 13, the date a bureaucratic arbitrary that makes staying in the country longer an impossibility.
In the meantime, it’s finals week at the school now, for Seamus at least. I don’t want to write about this, because it is not pleasant. So I will not.
Mount Merbabu – Gunung Merbabu – has been out in sharp relief this week, above the city, green and present. It’s huge, a presence more commanding than any of the mountains in Bozeman, and it slowly accumulates clouds over the course of a day, as the sky becomes overcast, though less inevitably now as we slip out of the rainy season.
After we dropped Michael off at the airport today, Graham and I went to the Central Java Museum, which is the sort of museum you could only love if you’d live in Central Java for a while. We were followed around by a group of girls – probably about 12 – in full headdresses. They were trying to covertly take our picture with their cellphones. One time one of the girls hid behind a display and poked her phone around the corner to click a shot of us. They would wander around casually at the displays where we were and pretend to be interested in them, and set up a shot with their friends in the picture, and then turn the camera to us and quickly click. When I could, I suddenly posed, smiling, and they shuffled away, giggling nervously. This is something that is simultaneously ridiculous (“Why do they want to take our picture?” Michael asked me on a crowded beach in South Java, as we were hoarded by crowds of people doing their characteristic posing hand signals, perplexed that it was, simply, because we are white), irritating (one time, in the Java Man museum, another hilarious museum with about five buildings, one third of one of which has some replicas of artifacts that have been shipped elsewhere, Laura and Seamus had their breakdown, because it was literally impossible to move without a crowd of school children jostling to get a picture), and extremely charming. It’s hard for me to get mad about it, because for some reason, bules here can, in certain places, set off a flurry of excitement.
I can’t see past the end of this trip right now (trip? That doesn’t seem like the right word), even though there are things in the United States looming, demanding my attention, popping up on my emails, reminders that people and institutions there know I am returning, that I in fact exist in that universe even so. When we left the United States, I remember feeling a sense of awe that we would be gone so long. “I won’t see this bench for a year,” I would say to myself. I was enthralled by that feeling, but not sad, not worried, not upset about it. But this is different. I am such an outsider here, the kind of freak that gets mobbed by fifth grade girls in headdresses only because my skin is a certain color. I mangle the language every time I open my mouth, and I cannot understand most of what people say to me. I get lost every time I leave Salatiga. I don’t understand Islam, and I haven’t even made the barest of dents in the Javanese language, which is what people really speak around here. It’s not my place, this country. I’ve seen about 1/20 of the country. I don’t belong here. I don’t understand it. I know next to nothing about it. So how can it be that leaving it fills me with a sadness deeper than the sadness I felt when I left the home I love, the home I hope I never have to move permanently from, the home I am, on another level, incredibly excited to see again?
When I am home, and sitting at a traffic light, and I am not surrounded by hordes of motorcycles jostling for position, filling in every space they can find, when none of those motorcycles have a family of four on them, the man driving and smoking with his two year old standing in front, hands relaxed on the handlebars – when I do not hear the fifteen dissynchronous call to prayers five times a day – when I go to a hotel, and everything works – when I fill up my car and it costs me more than my maid makes in a month – when there is a “no smoking” sign, and no one is smoking - this country will flood my brain, live in it in a way I could never have predicted.
I hope I can write about something else besides this incipient sense of loss in the next three weeks. Perhaps that will be my task, to remember where I am even still, and love it the way I have learned to love it in the last several months.
You guys are not going to know what to do with (lack of) Bozeman traffic. :D
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