Batavia.

Dear you,

You make me feel like one pre-menstrual mess. You place my closest relative two hours and a traffic jam away. Grandmother is only 5 hours away. That’s only about 2 additional hours, give or take. Do you realise how close I am to jumping on a train each weekend to run away from your neon lights?

I know I’m stubborn to insist on walking on your streets despite running into a pathway of flies and rubbish, rebelling against a land development authority that doesn’t exist. I skip the potholes and the rubble you call a pedestrian walk like it’s a game I used to play on colored tiles. Grey means safe. Black means I just walked into a pile of trash. But I still do it just because it gets me a little angrier each day…. which inadvertently makes me happy.

Like a nanny, you take care of the kids and the lazy on the sidewalks of your junctions. So you raise resilient children, living on the margins of your capitalists, wanting the very same things. And every year or so when they feel like playing around with economics and welfare by increasing the profit margins of their oil companies, your roads are swarmed with demonstrators without a cause. You can do better than this. How can you let the machinations of these emperors run?

Still, you do things each day that tilt my head skywards with every passing skyscraper. I’m transfixed by the glass panes which in the morning seem to absorb dawn’s rainbow coloured skies and in the evening seem to preserve its turquoise and blue afternoons within its panes. The little things you do: a row of flags flirting with the wind in jewel shades across the highways to greet the coming of another president and another trail of disappointment. How will you break our heart?

At least this empty house contains my hollowness. And I know when I leave it’ll follow me there. It’ll contain all the things you make feel and you make me feel so angry, giddy, alone, frustrated, enchanted and overwhelmed. I think it’s called feeling alive.

I want to be in five places right now, at the same time. But that’s half a lie.

I have 11 days left and all those 11 small little days would rather be spent here within you.