Malang
I was barely putting myself all together when I sat down alone on the scratched wooden bench that unusually happened to be at the corner of this massive, tedious room. The room of my head, where the whole beautiful vision of you guys never once stopped crossing it.
And for a split second everything came back to my head, all those delighted faces of yours. Your giggles, your unnecessary swearing, your annoying shouts, even your totally simple and easy-copied signatures. But we all survived, through all those deathly lines of graphics, all the barely readable writings on the whiteboard, all the pathogens killing our Zea mays with the disease they brought, all the mystify orders of soil layers, and the differences we barely cared about between Inceptisol and Oxisols. We survived through all of that.
And I never knew what I had done really well that could give me such a blessed privilege to meet every single one of you somehow. One thing I was sure, these questionable reasons, I didn’t want to question them, I wanted to thank them.
Thank you, all of you, for making me love this old town perpetually just over again every day. Thank you for blowing such a blessed propinquity that warmed up this cold-known town, thank you for telling me that even in the coldest part of any hemisphere, just a togetherness that could make the air warm again. Thank you for kidnapping me to some other lost town destination midnight driving. Thank you for throwing some disgusting jokes that made our belly hurt in every boring class we should deal with. Thank you for taking me out of the blue to some randomly far places at 11 pm just because we wanted to sing some mad songs uncontrollably in the car. Thank you for crowding the room, with me standing in the middle of it openly, honestly, without any lies covering my body. Thank you for accepting me the way I am. Thank you guys, for always backing me up.
And maybe thanking you will hurt me because I’m fully aware about what all of this means, maybe it will hurt some of you, maybe not, I’m not sure. But one thing I’m really sure, this is not a valedictory speech. This doesn’t mean every single one of us goes our separates way to catch our own dreams in some hard-pronounced part of town not intending to meet each other again. It’s just me. And I will always remember your faces. I will always go back to you. Because you’re all the formers of some other version of me in this town. And I love that version.
Thank you, for giving me such a massive part in my life with this fascinatingly beautiful one year.
— Aulia, 2017
