Vol. III — We Waxed Poetic But Then Where Would It Take Us?
Welcome back to Weekly, Maybe, a non-ambitious newsletter by Christabelle, Avi, and Rara. Last week, we celebrated moments where we rise from failure and keep on pushing on because there’s “no way around but through”. Well, this time we’d like to stop for a minute and acknowledge the absurdity of it all. Chris meanders on the shapelessness of this time, Avi gets nostalgic about trips to the malls, and Rara talks about mothers in her poem (happy mother’s day!). Sometimes we feel it’s self-indulgent, but who knows, maybe it’s also part of The Process. Either way, we want to thank you for being here — reaching out to you has made us feel a lot less lonely.
Christabelle: Fleeting Insignificance
“What even is time anymore?” As yesterday, today, tomorrow dissolve into one long stretch of who knows when and how long, my sleep pattern has been supremely fucked and I’ve been having a hard time recalling things that took place as recently as last week.
Mornings are easy. I’ve always found poetic hope in the act of pulling back the curtains and pushing my windows open each morning to let the sun in. But 6pm is when the shit show begins. Nothing emphasizes the sameness of each passing day like switching on the lights in my room as the sunset fades and dark settles. Look how everything is still exactly how they were, save for the diminishing ingredients in the fridge, the half-cut cucumber, the eggs that have gone from 12 to 4, the moldy bread a few days past its expiry date. Switching on the light to walk around my space at dusk is what I imagine being at the receiving end of a prank reveal might feel like; jokes on me, I am absolutely still here, we are not going anywhere.
Other timestamps: the corner of my room I reorganized three weeks ago to make space for my quarantine movements (more cooking, more working, less skincare, less thinking of what to wear). An empty 30 Mile Cabernet Sauvignon bottle that a friend had sent on my birthday over a month ago. The Call Me by Your Name soundtrack vinyl that another friend had sent two weeks ago.
Most everything else in between those moments have been a repeat. Days so uniform, so predictable that if one took a step back, a whole month is really just a whole day. I could time travel a few weeks back, choose to go down a completely different path and still end up at exactly where I am right now. Tinkering with the details will not change the plot.
Maybe when you take away the rollercoaster of emotions typical of a normal Jakarta day pre-quarantine, you also remove the frame that gives it shape and holds it together. To my surprise, I haven’t developed a resentment for doing the dishes — and it’s not that I love them either. They just seem to be constantly there and I do them without much thought, sometimes it feels like I’ve spent half the day just doing dishes without even intending to. My laundry is just a rotation of three pajama pants and shirts of varying degrees of worn-ness. Occasionally, a cute top I haven’t seen in ages would present itself in the mess of my closet and yeah, sure, maybe I’ll pair that with pajama pants, maybe I’ll do a Tik Tok dance video to mark the occasion. Is the mundane still mundane if it’s become your entire life? I don’t know.
It’s disorienting how the consequence of a change so monumental and significant can be, in practice, the exact opposite of all that: sustained stillness, fleeting moments of insignificance. Nothing has ever felt more meaningful and meaningless at the same time.
This is Day 59 for me and it’s all starting to feel less like a long sigh and more like constant internal crying. There is a heaviness to my days and I fear thinking of the future (some form of future) lest it gives me false hope or instills in me possibilities I am not quite ready for.
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P.S. In general, I’m not that OK but I’m also OK, if that makes sense. I try to add color to an otherwise grey canvas here and there, where/when possible. A quick run through of some delightful things: I’ve been rereading chapters from Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and not the Mood and Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, and yesterday I watched this talk between Jenna Wortham and Jia Tolentino. I like the idea of outsourcing my thoughts and feelings to people whose minds seem better equipped to process them.
Also, in a call a few weeks ago, a friend had us play a game of crossword that he made on an excel sheet, which turned out to be a really fun virtual after-hours hangout. In the spirit of sharing energy and joy, I’ll post his puzzle at the end of this newsletter in case you’d like to give it a shot.
Avi: If Not To the Mall, Then Where?
The mall can mean different things to different people, but if you live in Jabodetabek, it must at least mean something. For me, growing up that’s where I had my first date, where friends hosted their birthday dinners, where we went bowling, ice-skating, and even swimming on the weekend. On a weekday, it was a much-needed stop along the 2-hour way between school and our home in the suburb where my dad could catch a prayer, mom could take a breather, and I could stretch my legs. It’s where things were fine, or fine again, or even if they weren’t, strolling through its hallways made me feel that at some point they would be — they could be. Malls were the quick-fix to a broken heart, a bad day at the office, a boring day at home in a city that lacks parks, or squares, or beaches; a one-stop solution for us who don’t even the time or headspace to come up with an elaborate plan to cheer ourselves up. Embarrassed as I may be about this, malls have been an integral part of my life.
Now I do feel bad for thinking about malls in a time like this — I don’t allow myself to miss it more than I ethically should — but that’s not to say I don’t miss it at all. So the other day I dug up an old archive of all things malls for me to read, maybe reminisce, and here they are in case going to the mall is something you also remember with great fondness. We are doing just fine without malls, and we will be fine without them years from now, but once upon a time, we were truly happy inside the mall.
Poems:
At The Galleria Shopping Mall, by Tony Hoagland;
On a Pair of Young Men in the Underground Parking Garage at fX Sudirman Mall, by Norman Erikson Pasaribu (translated by Tiffany Tsao);
The Mall, by Evelyn Lau.
Longer reads:
Everything Mall Is New Again, by Krithika Varagur;
When Malls Saved the Suburbs From Despair, by Ian Bogost;
Utopia Interrupted: The Uncertain Future of the Mall, by Matthew Newton;
An Alternate Future for the Mall, by Madeleine Wattenbarger;
I Spent 19 Hours in One of Jakarta’s Ritziest Malls, by Gabrielle Lipton;
and, uh, an interview with Intan Paramaditha by yours truly from way back when that, while it doesn’t specifically talk about Malls, happened to take place inside one.
Rara: What Are We Supposed To Do with Mothers
I used to have recurring nightmares of a crab-like creature chasing me down the street along Pangkajene river and then suddenly along Avenue West. Streets I grew up in while she was somewhere else busy mothering someone else. Which includes cooking, bedtime stories, combing hair — but not limited to? The neighbors would sometimes make me stay for dinner. The smell of spices and fresh laundry. Watching Freaky Stories: “It happened to a friend of a friend of a friend of mine.” Yet they seemed to treat their mothers like nuisance, like the crab-like creature but tamed. I thought what’s the worst that could happen — that it stabs me with its claws / drags me to an underground hole / helps me with homework? (But not limited to.) Maybe we’ll have non-stop consecutive birthday parties. So one day I stopped running and waited until it caught up to me. It was not as scary as I thought it would look. In fact, it just looked sad and tired, standing there, not moving.
Before you go…
As promised, here’s a crossword for when you’re looking to pass the time this week, by friend-of-the-newsletter Chandraditya Kusuma. We’ll post the answers in our next letter! :)