Both of Cold Home

Since I transformed my old room into a studio, the scent of my main house has become nostalgic: some kind damp smell, as if signifying that it’s getting lonelier, leaving my brother’s family there, after me and my parents moved out. The familiar house felt strangely unfamiliar now as I stepped upstairs to the second floor.

The dusty construction helmet hangs behind my studio door, on the same wall with the moodboard. I hang photos, sketches, wishes, upcoming plans, and movie tickets there. Images of passed joy, promising future, and European urban photos I got from my foreign pen pal are now distant and meaningless. A wall itself is a moodboard of my future imagery, and ironically, memories left towards the gradual pain of adulthood. Nothing more than a graveyard of loss, farewell, and failure. 

People say time stopped in 2020. Yet it kept moving; I was the one frozen in place.

Indeed, the pandemic was bad. But I was lucky ‘cause I got an internship out of Jakarta. Another chance to get out from the probability of me hearing the unpredictable chaos in my house: I’d never see Mom cry or be bruised by my Dad again. I’d adjusted myself to live with the soulless concrete only, supervised and tested by construction tools, hailed by engineers as the first building to adopt the newest technology, also stood as a symbol of modern civilization.

Constructions are cold, so is the building. Amid steel, concrete, and machinery, the construction lights became the closest thing to warmth.

The tower cranes above me were like the hand of God making His grandeur creations. Workers climbed the rebar. The wet concrete loaded into the formwork. And the relentless drone of the concrete vibrator noise muffled my painful trauma at my house. As I climbed upstairs, I celebrated my freedom silently. The wind blew to my safety vest and the drawing sheets I brought. When it came to my night shift, stars were below me, spread on the land. The world seemed smaller. 

Yet whatever you call it smaller, you’re the actual small one. Engineers debating whether which are the most important in construction, civil engineers or architects? Loud voices arguing at the office after the owner requested for adding some architectural features. Architectural features add significant structural load, plus a ‘thought’ load of civil engineers’ heads – means burden to them. They’d stroke their pen on the paper, calculate the construction while making slurry comments about idealistic architects for putting aesthetics above all else. Two architecture interns in that period – me and my friend – were the easiest scapegoat.

Sounds though, but I enjoyed it, the most. My life was there with a spatial dead thing. Surrounded by analytical people, and masculines you couldn’t sense specifically either which one was the most monstrous one, and the safest one for a woman like me.

I imagine if this soulless thing was destroyed by humans  – maybe with a wrecking ball or implosion, but with accurate planning and the environmental consequences, while humans, ironically, destroyed mercilessly without thinking of the consequences by their own kind. Like my mom had, and me by my ex.

On the top of the building, the higher it got, the more brutal the wind was. The hammering noise and flowing concrete were still ongoing amidst this cold world. Yet the sun still rose beautifully, along with the lonely “Bintang Kejora” – a Morning Star I usually sang in my childhood.

The lamp on green and red zone turned off at 6 and gave me a go. I took off all the safety gears by the end of 2020. Then I turned on my survival mode (again) bound to my home.

See you, Alam Sutera.