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An essay by Afu, encrypted with the Vigenere cipher.

Just because.

This morning I opened up the Google homepage and saw a doodle of a birthday cake. I thought to myself, who’s this famous fellow who shares birthdays with me?

It turns out it was Google feature, detecting my birthday and all.

So here I am, two decades old. Two friggin’ decades.

In two decades, I grew from a really cute baby boy in Melbourne who can’t close his mouth,

to a still cute little kid who was so curious about the world he’d go on a Damri from Dago to Leuwipanjang and back with his babysitter just for the saker of doing it,

to a Melbournian boy spending lots of time with his best friends Galih and Hanif, spending time at Southbank, going to museums, playing neopets and whatnot,

to somewhat of a public enemy in junior high school slash school magazine redesigner,

to a teenage douche who would number exes and write them on his (old) blog,

to a high school achiever who would skip a quarter of a year joining debate competitions, and winning some while at it,

to a part of Team Indonesia with his brothers Irfan, Garlan and Rifky, proudly representing his homeland amidst Qatari generosity (Marriott food tent FTW!)

to an ITB student and CIMB Niaga Scholar,

to varsity debater, dropping by IVED and SEO 2011, snatching some awards,

to a newfound MUN enthusiast who happened to snatch an award oat HNMUN,

to… well, a fifth-semester Informatics student struggling with his assignments.

I have gone through a lot. Today, thanks to a couple of text messages from my dear friends and a video from my girlfriend, I realize that I’ve recently started to forget about all that.

Let’s make sure I don’t, then.

So that’s what birthdays are for!

The other day I was watching Midnight in Paris with Cahya. Hemingway (spoiler alert!) said in the movie that true love makes us invincible; it makes us not fear death.

I would beg to differ. It does sound sweet and it might be a killer pickup line if used appropriately, but I don’t think that’s what love is.

So what is love?

Some people say it’s a heavy word. They say it screams for commitment, living together, or something that serious. I had a friend who during his exchange year innocently said “I love you” to a female friend of his, who later on freaked out.

Some people say that love does not need to be defined; that love is not to be questioned, for it is the answer.

A lot of people make songs about love. In a way, love sells.

Some people also sell love. Whatever that means.

Some people love sellers. Like, they’re married to a shopkeeper.

And some people love sea shells.

Ahem.

I think love is many things. It is better felt and not put into words. I truly admire authors who are able to describe love so passionately in letters and punctuation; something that I believe I am rather failing to do in this post.

Love can be felt when dating with your girlfriend doing assignments and listening to Korean love songs. Until you realize that That XX by GD isn’t actually much of a love song.

You feel love in romantic moments, of course. Like, going to a fancy restaurant for dinner on a Saturday night. Except when you’re only going there to deliver a gift for a friend of yours, and besides, there’s a wedding there so the place is crowded.

There are many other, less fancy places to go on dates - something you do when you’re in love. It’s just that once you calculate the money that you have in your wallet, the type of food that you want, the coziness of the place, and occasionally fast internet access, you end up picking one particular cafe, located near your campus. You end up going there at least twice a week.

You feel love whether you are healthy or ill. Including when both of you are having stomachaches after eating Manado food followed by (really good) gulai.

When you love someone, you’re in love everyday. And every single time you meet her, no matter what mood you are in, no matter whether she’s on PMS or not, no matter whether she has a huge zit in the middle of her nose or her eyes arebintitan, you end up salting. And no, not menggaram. Not that you’d think I’d be that corny.

Love makes you a better person. It teaches you lessons, such as how to be patient when your girlfriend is on PMS and her moodswings resemble an ultra-high frequency sine wave. Occasionally, it might even be a high-frequency tangential wave. Are there such things, though?

Oh and when you’re in love with someone, sometimes you don’t just date, but you also join Model UN conferences together. Then wear matching clothes. Then perhaps buy a new dress and a pair of stilettos. Then you realize that during the three days you’ve been doing that, not a single decent photo of the two of you has been taken.

I’ll tell you what, I can go on and on writing these cheesy lines about how I feel in my relationship with Cahyawardhani: how cutely absurd we (think (and claim (oh my god nested brackets!)) we) are, how ASEAN we are (we’ve both joined ASEAN youth summits, different ones though), how I feel so lucky to be loved by someone as lively, geeky, hipster-y as she is.

I am happy. I don’t feel invincible, not at all, and I don’t feel like I’m high on coke (not that I know how that feels) (except Coca-Cola, which gives me stomachache), but I’m alone in the guest room of my aunt’s place writing this on Tumblr and here I am, smiling.

So, to make this look cool and link back to Hemingway’s line, I don’t think that love is supposed to make you invincible and not fear death.

We fear death because it is unknown to us. But death is not the only thing we fear: to survive life itself requires courage. So let’s just say that being in love makes you not fear life.

I know, it sounds nowhere near as cool as Hemingway, but who am I to even try to beat Hemingway? Come to think of it, I’m not really sure the real Hemingway ever wrote the same line.

And I am happy.

So anyway, happy hemi-anniversary, Cahyawardhani! <3