When I’m hurt, my typical initial reaction would be to call a friend avoid people. I would even leave my habitat and start over, meeting new people until I’m hurt again. There is a reason for this, at least. There is something about pain that makes you crave it. You see, for me, like love, pain is a life gift. You get hurt, you want to feel the pain, to celebrate it. Sometimes you do it by hurting yourself. But, unlike love, pain is not a limited substance – it grows. Sometimes it’s not enough to hurt yourself, you hurt others because you cannot contain the over-growing pain within yourself. I seemed to understand this mechanism hence I kept running away. Continue reading
soliloquy
PLATH: THIS IS NOT I
Seven years ago, I was invited to perform my poetry in Jakarta on one of the two nights of a literary event.
I just finished, at that time, a poetry performance project with some young musician and artist friends and had successfully performed in two cities. However, the committee of the event in Jakarta wanted me to perform alone, just me and my poetry, or in the man-in-charge’s own words: “could you just come without your boyfriend?” He sounded bitter, and he was wrong – my then boyfriend had nothing to do with art except that of making me cry. Love, love, love… Continue reading
CHICKEN AND FREUD: IS ROASTING MENTAL?

A friend of mine warned me recently: “beware, baking is addictive.” I looked blankly at the roast chicken a la Jamie Oliver I’d prepared for us and replied, “but I roasted.” She just smirked. “Roasting, baking, grilling — whatever you call it. Just as long as you use your oven.”
I wasn’t sure where she was going with the oven metaphor and I didn’t ask. Continue reading
FOR THE LOVE OF THE RAIN

Believe me when I say it was miserable, but also believe me when I say I loved it.
I’m a mess. I love walking in the rain on my own.
In my garden in Indonesia I used to sit in the tropical rain, raining. That made a painful view for the people who loved me, but when they had loved me better they’d leave me alone.
The rain is my sacred place since my childhood. There’s something about being alone with the rain that makes me so in touch with the exiled feelings inside me.
Those that do not suit the dry days reality, or the reality at all, or so it seems.
Those that make me alive, exist, brokenly whole.

–dina oktaviani
