I don't think you were ever my best friend.

And maybe that is the entire reason it took me by surprise when the room started feeling so different after you left.

We only shared that space for a single semester, roughly six months of an ordinary first year. It wasn't a long time. It certainly wasn't long enough to build the kind of friendship that takes up space in public. I never threw my arms around your neck when we met outside the faculty building. We didn't playfully flirt the way close girl friends often do. We didn't spend late nights obsessing over each other’s personal lives or digging through the heavy, messy parts of our pasts. If someone looked at us from the outside, they wouldn't have seen two inseparable people. They would have just seen two first-year students who happened to rent beds in the same room.

You had your life. I had mine.

We were in the same major, but our class schedules rarely overlapped. You woke up at different hours, moved in different circles, and carried a completely different history.

And yet, for that one semester, our days ended in the exact same four-cornered room.

Listening to you talk about your world was like looking through an open window into a neighborhood I had never been allowed to visit.

You were financially comfortable. Your family felt steady, functional, and whole. When you talked about them, there was no hesitation, no hidden tension, no defensive caution in your voice. You had close friends you could reach out to without calculating whether you were being a burden. You moved through the world with this quiet, instinctive assumption that people were generally safe, that things would mostly work out, and that you belonged wherever you stood.

I envied you.

I don't want to soften that or make it sound poetic. There were evenings when you’d sit on your bed talking about an easy weekend at home or a trip with your friends, and a sharp, bitter little ache would flare up in my chest.

I wish I had that.

Not because I wanted to take your peace away from you. I never wanted you to have less. I just wanted to know what it felt like to exist in a life where safety was a given rather than something you had to constantly scrape together and defend.

The strange thing was that my envy never turned into resentment.

I actually loved listening to you.

You would tell me about your day, and I would tell you about mine. We talked about absurd campus rumors, frustrating assignments, what we ate for lunch, and the completely ordinary things that happened on our separate sides of the faculty. Neither of us had to force the rhythm. We didn't have to scramble to find topics just to prove we were close.

We would talk until the story ran out, and then we would simply stop.

I would put in my earbuds and write. You would open your laptop and study. I would fold my laundry; you would lie on your bed staring at the ceiling. We could spend three hours in absolute silence without a single drop of tension between us.

Nothing about it looked important while it was happening.

That is the most frustrating thing about the parts of our lives that actually keep us afloat: they rarely announce their own value.

I used to believe that for a relationship to matter, it had to be intense. I thought meaningful friendships were defined by shared history, inside jokes that nobody else understood, constant messages, and mutual proof that you were each other's priority. That was what I had known before college.

With you, there was nothing to prove.

You didn't need to know the darkest corners of my head. You didn't have to act as my therapist. You never tried to fix me, give me profound life advice, or "save" me from anything.

You just had to exist in the room.

And I had no idea how much weight that word “exist” was carrying.

Because you were there on the days where nothing happened. The blank, unmemorable days where I didn't achieve anything, didn't go anywhere, and had nothing interesting to say. You were just another human being occupying the same air, breathing evenly, untroubled by the world.

Without ever realizing it, you were showing me something I desperately needed to see: what an emotionally regulated life looked like in real time.

You showed me that you could disagree with someone without turning it into a catastrophe. You showed me that you could leave a text unread for an hour without assuming the relationship was ruined. You showed me what it looked like when a person didn't treat daily life like an impending battle.

You never intended to teach me that. You were just living your life. But for my own nervous system, sitting across the linoleum from someone who wasn't constantly on high alert felt like walking into a cool room after hours in the sun.

Then the semester ended, and you decided to commute.

Going back and forth from home every day.

It was the most practical choice for you, and it made complete sense. You didn't leave campus. You didn't drop out. You didn't stop being my friend.

You just stopped being there.

That was when I learned that a massive portion of human connection isn't built on deep emotional compatibility, it is built on simple, unglamorous proximity.

It is built on the fact that you happen to sit next to each other long enough. It is built on having zero barrier between having a thought and saying it out loud.

When you lived with me, I didn't need a reason to talk to you. I didn't need to craft a message, hit send, and wait. You were just three feet away. If something was mildly annoying, I could complain. If neither of us had anything to say, the space still wasn't empty.

Now, if I want to talk to you, I have to initiate. We have to plan. We have to coordinate schedules.

The friendship didn't die; the effortless access to it did.

Now, a new semester has started, and there is a new roommate in the bed across from mine. She has only been here for about a week. She is nice, we are polite, and we are slowly figuring out how to share the same space without stepping on each other's toes.

Yet living with someone new only makes the contrast sharper. It reminds me that comfortable coexistence isn't an automatic setting that comes with every shared room. It takes time, or maybe it just requires a very specific, unforced rhythm that you and I happened to stumble into without even trying.

We don't really see each other much now. Because our classes are completely separate, our paths don't naturally cross on campus, and you head straight home once your day is done. There are no regular run-ins, no spontaneous conversations in the hallway. We just exist on different schedules in the same faculty.

I don't wish we had been best friends. I don't need to romanticize what we were or pretend we were soulmates.

I loved our friendship precisely because it was small, quiet, and ordinary.

I loved that I could sit near someone whose life was healthier and safer than mine, feel a brief pang of envy, and yet feel completely protected simply by sharing her space for a few short months.

You didn't fix my life. You didn't know you were helping my mental health. You probably remember our semester together as just a pleasant, normal time with a roommate you got along with.

And you’re right. That’s all it was.

I just didn't realize until you packed your boxes that I didn't need someone to understand everything about me to make the world feel safe.

I didn't need you to be my best friend.

I just needed someone to be in the room. And I didn't understand how much that meant until the semester was over.

When I think back to who I was in high school, I get this weird mix of feelings—I want to laugh, hide my face in my hands, and give her a huge hug all at the same time.

Back then, I was carrying feelings that felt way too big for me to handle. I was experiencing that very first intense taste of falling for someone, and I loved in the only loud, poetic, and slightly chaotic way I knew how. Looking back today, I refuse to call her embarrassing. She was just young, completely sincere, and a lot braver than she gave herself credit for. I can’t blame her for falling in love; she was just learning how it all worked.

We weren't even in the same social world at school. I was over in Social Sciences 3, and he was in Social Sciences 6. But my chairmate was close with his circle, which meant my three-year crush was pretty much an open secret.

Holding onto a crush in silence for that long is exhausting. It creates this constant noise in your head where you're overanalyzing every small interaction, measuring your steps, and walking on eggshells. Eventually, keeping it all inside felt heavier than the fear of just putting it out there. So, I typed everything down into a long message and hit send.

I was terrified. I braced myself for the awkwardness, the subtle humiliation, and the very real chance that I wouldn't be able to look him in the eye ever again. But I didn't confess because I was expecting him to become my boyfriend, or because I was demanding he love me back. I just needed to be honest with myself, to let him know that his existence meant something really sweet to me, and to finally set myself free from unspoken words.

Not too long ago, I actually posted a video on TikTok sharing the text of that high school confession. Out of nowhere, it blew up and hit almost 300,000 views. Reading through the comments was a huge eye-opener.

A lot of people jumped in with the classic rulebook: "It's a girl's nature to be chased, not to chase," or "A girl should never confess first, it's a loss." Others shared their own horror stories, how putting their heart out there ended in getting cold-read, ignored, blocked, or shot down with a single, brutal sentence. On the flip side, some people praised how gently the whole thing was handled, and a few girls even messaged me saying my story gave them the courage to finally speak up. In the end, though, the whole thing felt a bit too cliché and exposed, so I decided to take the video down.

But that TikTok comment section proved one big thing: most people are genuinely scared to be honest about their feelings because we've all been taught that vulnerability usually leads to getting hurt.

Which brings me back to his response that day.

I had prepared myself for the worst—a cold "read," a short awkward reply, or complete silence. Instead, he handled my confession with a level of grace that still amazes me for a high school guy.

His response followed a pattern I didn't know a teenage boy was capable of:

First came appreciation. He didn't rush to say "I'm sorry, I don't like you." He started by acknowledging the effort and vulnerability I put into my text:

"Thank you so much for typing all of this, for making such beautiful and touching messages... You’re so cool for holding onto these feelings for so long. You're really strong."

Then came validation. He made sure I understood that my feelings were not a burden or an embarrassment. He even took the time to read everything carefully:

"I want to read it slowly so I can absorb every message you sent with such sincerity and courage."

Next was unfiltered honesty. He clearly stated his boundaries—explaining that he simply wasn't ready to return those feelings, without offering breadcrumbs of false hope:

"I apologize, but I can’t return your feelings, as sincere as they are... But thank you so much for placing such a big feeling on me."

And finally, respect. He remained warm, genuine, and showed how much he appreciated the moment for what it was:

"I rarely find anyone brave enough to express their feelings as sincerely as you did. You are an amazing person."

Even after laying out his boundaries, he didn't just end the conversation abruptly or leave me feeling abandoned in my vulnerability. He took a moment to check in on me, asking how I was doing, making sure I was okay, and genuinely wishing that I was doing well after putting so much of my heart out there.

A lot of time passed after that text. In most high school stories, confessing ruins everything and turns two people into awkward strangers. But that wasn't what happened with us.

Much later, through mutual friends, an opportunity came up for us to take a photo together. I was still super shy, but when my friends finally pushed us into the frame, he was completely normal, warm, and polite. No weird tension, no cold avoidance, no performative distance.

That small moment proved something I think a lot of people in those TikTok comments needed to hear: a rejection doesn't have to ruin human warmth. When two people treat each other with basic decency, an unrequited feeling can just settle into a quiet, peaceful space.

Those intense high school feelings are long gone now. We’ve both grown up, moved on, and stepped into completely different lives. I don't look back at him as "the one that got away," and I don't sit around wondering "what if."

But he gave me a lesson I'll hold onto forever. He set the bar for how I expect to be treated: clarity is kindness, respect is non-negotiable, and half-hearted, low-effort energy is never worth settling for. If a teenage boy in a high school hallway could receive a huge, vulnerable confession with that much grace and respect, then I have zero reason to accept anything less as an adult.

He rejected my feelings, but he never rejected my humanity. And to a young girl learning how to navigate love for the very first time, that was everything.

I spent years watching the world from the sidelines, convinced that everyone else possessed some secret manual for functioning that I had somehow missed. I looked at people who were articulate, outdoorsy, or mathematically brilliant, and I assumed they were born that way. Meanwhile, I felt small. I spent the better part of my youth wondering if I could ever be braver, smarter, or better at communicating. And because I felt like I couldn’t, I chose the safest option available: I did nothing. I never tried.

I became an expert at running away right before the finish line.

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When I was in junior high, my science teacher believed I was good enough to represent the school in an olympiad. I remember my mother driving me there, sitting with me through the quiet anticipation. I remember finishing the questions. And I remember a sudden wave of panic washing over me before I could even hand in the paper. I asked my mom if we could just... go home.

I didn’t want to hear the winners. Not because I had already lost, but because I had already decided I would. My mother and I left before the announcement, leaving the building behind in a blur of anxiety. Days later, I found out I had actually become a finalist. It is strange how often my life has been interrupted by conclusions I wrote before reality had the chance to finish the sentence.

Fear has never sounded dramatic inside my head. It has always sounded incredibly reasonable:

“You’re not really an outdoor person.”

“The math club is full of people much smarter than you.”

“Your friend quit anyway.”

“Someone else deserves the position more.”

“You’ll embarrass yourself.”

Fear has always spoken to me in complete sentences. That’s what made it so convincing.

In high school, I joined the mountaineering club. I wasn’t adventurous. I hated insects. I hated uncertainty. Truthfully, I was only there because of a boy—a quiet, agonizing three-year crush that I kept locked away. I imagined myself staying, growing bold, finally being seen. Instead, I disappeared. When my friend decided to leave the club, I grabbed it as the perfect exit strategy. I blamed my personality. I blamed my friend for leaving. I blamed the club. I blamed timing. Looking back, I was simply looking for prettier words to avoid saying: “I was scared.”

There was also the math club. I wanted it so badly, but I looked at the people who were already fluent in equations and let myself feel small. I never registered. Not because I wasn’t interested, but because I assumed everyone else belonged there more than I did. It’s fascinating how the human mind can draft an entire rejection letter without anyone ever picking up a pen.

The student council interview still hurts the most. I fought the fear for a fleeting moment. I prepared everything. Every document. Every requirement. Every line on my CV neatly formatted. Everything except the courage to actually walk into the room the next morning.

As I lay in bed that night, the fear grew into a monster too large to face. The next day, I simply... didn’t go. Nobody rejected me. I ghosted my own dreams. I rejected myself first.

Looking back, I think that’s what fear had been teaching me all along: Don’t wait for life to tell you no. Say it to yourself first. It hurts less. Except it doesn’t. It just hurts longer.

For years, a ringing phone felt less like communication and more like an unexpected exam. An act of violence against my peace. Not from classmates. Not from friends. Not from unknown numbers. If you knew me then, you knew the rule: Please text me. Don’t call.

It wasn’t until university—literally just a year ago that I finally forced my throat to open up and answer. Not because I had suddenly become confident, but because eventually, adulthood sends enough phone calls that avoiding them becomes more exhausting than answering them.

When people describe fear, they often talk about what it stops them from doing. Mine was different. Fear made me incredibly busy. Busy imagining. Busy preparing. Busy researching. Busy rewriting. Busy waiting. Busy becoming a version of myself who would eventually feel ready.

The only thing I wasn’t busy doing... was beginning.

Then, something embarrassingly ordinary happened. I got tired. Not inspired. Not healed. Not suddenly transformed by a stroke of genius. Just... tired.

Tired of hearing my own theories. Tired of watching opportunities become someone else’s memories. Tired of wondering what kind of person I might have been if I had simply showed up. So I made a deal with myself. I would stop negotiating with fear. Not defeat it. Not silence it. Just stop asking for its permission.

And suddenly, within the span of two weeks, the universe decided to test my exhaustion. My life became almost unrecognizable. Four separate announcements. Four separate yeses. I started an online psychology internship. I joined a psychology community. I became part of my university committee for the upcoming World Mental Health Day. I joined an educational community advocating for women and raising awareness about sexual violence. A year ago, this avalanche of responsibility would have been my absolute nightmare. Today, it’s just my calendar.

And then, someone made a decision that completely confused me. They handed me the microphone. They chose me to lead. Me. The girl who once ran away before hearing the results. The girl who skipped interviews she had spent nights preparing for. The girl who begged people never to call her.

Now I am expected to act like a seasoned professional. I organize meetings. I lead a division. I write reports. I speak during Zoom calls—which are really just phone calls with faces attached to them. Every single task feels like something fear would have forbidden twelve months ago.

Sometimes, during meetings, my hands shake when I click “Unmute.” I look around the virtual room and think, “They made a mistake. There are people here so much more articulate than I am. People who sound like they were born for leadership. Why me?”

But perhaps that has always been the wrong question. Because every meaningful opportunity I’ve ever received has been followed by exactly the same thought. “Why me?”

Never, “Why not me?”

Here’s the uncomfortable truth I wish someone had told me years ago: Confidence is an incredibly unreliable narrator. If I had waited until I believed I was capable, I would’ve missed every single thing currently changing my life. Because confidence wasn’t waiting for me at the starting line. It was hiding inside the very things I kept refusing to do.

I used to believe courage arrived before action. Now I suspect courage is something action leaves behind. Like footprints. You don’t find courage and then begin. You begin. Then one day, looking back at the ground you’ve covered, you realize courage had been quietly following you all along.

Sometimes I think about that girl who left before the olympiad announcement. I don’t blame her anymore. She wasn’t weak. She simply believed disappointment was more dangerous than regret. She was wrong. Regret is quieter, but it tastes bitter for a lifetime.

And maybe that’s why this season of my life feels different. Not because I have magically become fearless, but because I have finally become more afraid of living the same story twice than I am of failing.

My hands still shake. My knees still tremble. But for the first time in my life, fear is no longer writing the script. It is merely reading over my shoulder while I write it myself.

When I was young, God felt close. Not because my life was perfect, but because the distance between the earth and the sky felt short. When I cried, I dropped to the floor. When I was scared, I spoke into the dark, and I truly believed someone was leaning down to listen.

I don’t know when the sky moved away. Faith doesn’t leave you with a loud bang; it leaves the way a fire dies when you run out of wood. You sit there in the dark, shivering, and you can’t remember the exact second the warmth gave up. Adulthood didn’t make me angry at God. It just made me realize how alone I actually am in this room.

People think losing your religion looks like a wild rebellion—drinking, shouting, tearing down old walls. Mine looks like a small, cheap room in a city that would let me starve and never notice. It looks like staring at a prayer mat covered in dust and feeling absolutely nothing.

One night, the weight of everything got too heavy. The bills, the loneliness, the breaking pieces of my family, it was all crushing my chest. I forced myself down. I forced my forehead to the carpet.

I tried to pray, but my soul wasn't there.

My body did the movements. My tongue said the Arabic words I learned when I was five. But inside, I was a hollow house. There was no one home. I was just a pile of bones and skin going up and down on a piece of fabric. I realized then that the hardest part isn't remembering the prayers. It is the hope. Hope costs too much when every single hand you open comes back empty. So, to protect whatever little bit of myself I had left, I closed my hands. I stopped asking.

Every morning, I still wrap the hijab around my head before I walk out into the world. I pin it in place. But I am not thinking about God when I look in the mirror.

• I am thinking about my grocery budget, wondering how to make the cheap food last.

• I am thinking about the digits in my bank account that keep getting smaller.

• I am thinking about how to play the part of the good girl so nobody asks me questions I cannot answer.

The truth is, that piece of cloth has lost its weight. When I’m just near my house, running a quick errand, stepping outside into the alley—I don't even bother putting it on anymore. I walk out with my bare hair uncovered, and inside me, there is only a flat, heavy emptiness. I don't really care who sees. I don't care what they think.

I've also found myself believing things that many people in my religious community would condemn. I have friends whose lives, whose loves, don't fit neatly into the rigid lines of what people call acceptable. They tell me love is love, and when I look at them, I believe it. I cannot bring myself to hate them. I cannot convince myself that compassion should disappear the moment someone's life doesn't look like a textbook. If anything, adulthood has made me more convinced that kindness is harder than judgment. Judgment is immediate; it takes nothing but a closed mind. Compassion asks something of you—it asks you to sit in the mud with someone.

Sometimes I wonder if I have become a monster. I don't party. I don't break rules for fun. But I am a ghost. I wear the uniform of a believer, but I skip the prayers for days at a time. And the worst part, the part that makes me feel truly broken is that the guilt doesn't even show up anymore.

Talking to God feels like standing on the street trying to talk to a stranger who speaks a different language.

When did this faith stop being a place to rest, and start being a scoreboard where I am always losing?

Our communities love the performance. We love the correct words, the beautiful clothes, the aesthetic pictures of holy books. But nobody knows how to look someone in the eyes and say, "I am dying inside." We are all so terrified of doubt. We treat it like a sickness you can catch. So we sit in our separate, dark rooms, listening to everyone else sound so disgustingly sure of themselves, while we wonder if we are already too far gone for the light to ever find us again.

The strange thing is, even with a dead soul and a dusty mat, I still try.

I still feel a sharp pain in my chest when I see someone else hurting. I still try to be soft in a world that is incredibly sharp. I try not to leave my heavy baggage on anyone else's shoulders. I try to say thank you to the world for the small things—a warm cup of coffee, a quiet evening.

I know these things won't buy me a ticket to heaven. I am realistic. But they are the only things keeping me from turning into stone. They remind me that even if my faith is dead, my humanity isn't.

I don’t know if I will ever find my way back to the carpet. I don’t know if I will ever cry during a prayer again, or if I will always feel like an outsider looking through the window of a house I used to live in.

Right now, the only true thing I have left is this grief. This pain is the only honest prayer I have offered in years. Because deep down, beneath the heavy concrete in my chest, there is still one small, stubborn piece of me that keeps looking up at the sky. Not because it answers me. But because, even in the middle of this freezing winter, I still hope someone is out there, listening to my silence.

I don't think people understand how quiet the dark actually is. They think it’s full of screaming, but it’s not. It’s just the sound of your own breath in a small room, realizing you’ve run out of ways to trick your brain into moving forward.

I don’t want to die. I think that’s the part that confuses me the most. I don’t want a tragic headline, and I don’t want to leave a stain on the floor for someone else to clean up. I don’t want to hurt the people who look at me and hope for my future. It’s not about blood or violence. It’s just that I look at the life I’ve been given, this specific set of cards, this brain, this family, this university, this constant, suffocating financial weight and I realize it’s a defective product. It was broken before I even opened the box. And I am just so tired of trying to glue a shattered mirror back together with my own blood, only to look into it and see a face I don't even recognize anymore.

I just want to return the leftovers. I want to pack up the remaining pieces of who I am, walk up to the counter of the universe, slide it across the table, and say, “I tried. I really did. But this doesn't fit me, and I can't afford the maintenance anymore.”

Because existing is so expensive. It costs too much money, and it costs too much spirit. Every single day I wake up in this university town, I am doing a math problem in my head that never balances out. I look at the tuition, the rent, the cost of groceries, every single rupiah that goes into keeping my heart beating, and a voice in the back of my mind just starts screaming. It tells me I am a bad investment. It tells me I am a black hole swallowing up resources that should be going to someone who actually knows how to be alive. I am sitting in lecture halls with a chest made of lead, looking at slides I can barely see through the gray fog in my eyes, thinking: What am I doing here? Why are we spending money to educate a ghost?

The independence I thought I wanted—the distance from home that felt like safety has just turned into a wider cage. I wanted to leave to find out who I was, but all I found was an empty room and a silence so loud it makes my ears ring. I sit here completely untethered. Everyone else has a compass. They have folders, they have career paths, they have mothers they call when they’re stressed who tell them everything is going to be okay. I look at my phone and I know that if I call home, it won't fix the hole in my chest. It will just make the guilt heavier. I am homesick for a place that doesn't exist. I am homesick for a childhood where somebody else was holding the flashlight, where I didn't have to become an adult at five years old just to make sure the walls didn't collapse on top of me.

I am nineteen, and I am already so old. I feel like a soldier who has been fighting a war since infancy, and now that I am finally out of the battlefield, my knees are buckling. My nervous system is calibrated to a storm, so now that I am in a quiet room, the peace just feels like an interrogation. I am constantly walking on eggshells inside my own mind, closing doors silently, breathing softly, waiting for a punishment that isn't coming anymore. I built my entire personality around avoiding pain, around being convenient, around being the one who never causes a problem. And the terrifying, heartbreaking realization of my adulthood is that it worked. I became so good at hiding my hurt that now, nobody even thinks to look for it. I am drowning in plain sight, replying to group project texts, nodding in class, laughing at the right times, and my friends are looking right at me and seeing a functioning student. They don’t see that behind my eyes, the lights are already off.

That is why the emergency exit looks so tempting. It’s not that I hate the world. It’s that I am emotionally bankrupt. I have zero resources left to give to next semester, or next week, or even tomorrow morning. The thoughts of just ending it aren't a monster in the closet anymore; they’re a quiet friend sitting at the edge of my bed, whispering that there is a way to make the noise stop. A way to stop the spending. A way to stop the relentless, agonizing performance of acting like a human being when I am entirely hollow inside. It promises rest. Just a long, dark, uninterrupted sleep where nobody expects anything from me, where I don't owe anyone an explanation, and where the math finally stops.

I don't want to break anyone's heart. I really don't. But it is so lonely to carry a vault you dare not open, knowing that if you let the dam break even a little bit, the flood will carry you away completely. I just want to slide out of the world the way a shadow slides out of a room when the sun goes down. No noise. No drama. Just a clean, quiet return. I just want to lay down the sword. I just want to rest.

It’s been a month since I came home for semester break, and there hasn’t been a single day where I didn’t eat vegetables.

It sounds like such a small thing.

A plate of stir-fried kangkung (water spinach sautéed with garlic), sayur asem (Indonesian tamarind vegetable soup), sayur sop (Indonesian vegetable soup with carrots, potatoes, and cabbage), boiled mustard greens, and whatever vegetables my mom happened to cook that day. The kind of food many Indonesian kids grow up eating without realizing how much care is hidden inside it.

But lately, I keep thinking about it.

Maybe because I realized that a lot of people my age don’t really eat vegetables. Throughout my life, I’ve had friends who hated them. Some grew up with parents who didn’t eat vegetables either. Some rarely had them at home. Others simply couldn’t stand the taste. It was always normal to hear someone say they hadn’t eaten vegetables in days—or even weeks.

And yet, somehow, vegetables were always present in my life.

When I was younger, I never thought much about it. They simply appeared on the table every day, as naturally as the sun rising every morning. I never questioned where they came from, who bought them, who washed them, who spent time cooking them, or who remembered that my body needed them.

I just ate.

Or sometimes I complained.

Now that I’m older and living away from home, I realize how easy it is to stop eating vegetables altogether.

In college, food becomes less about nutrition and more about survival. You buy whatever is cheapest, whatever fills your stomach the fastest, whatever fits into your budget. Instant noodles. Fried rice. Cheap snacks. Sugary drinks. Anything that gets you through the day.

And vegetables slowly disappear from the equation.

Not because you hate them. Not because you consciously choose not to eat them. But because life gets busy, money gets tight, and suddenly taking care of yourself becomes another thing on an already overwhelming to-do list.

I noticed this especially because my body noticed it before I did.

Whenever I’m away from home, I struggle with constipation more often. Fruits become occasional treats instead of daily habits. Vegetables become something I only eat when they happen to come with my meal. It’s funny, in a sad kind of way. My body was quietly reminding me of everything my mother had been doing for years.

Not just feeding me.

Taking care of me.

Protecting me in ways I couldn’t even see.

Because now I realize that eating vegetables every day wasn’t a habit I magically developed on my own. It was something my mother built into my life. Patiently. Consistently. Without expecting praise. Without announcing it. Without turning it into a lesson.

She simply made sure they were there. Every day. Over and over again.

And maybe that’s what love often looks like.

Not grand gestures. Not dramatic sacrifices. Not the kind of love that gets turned into movies or poems.

Maybe love is repetitive.

Maybe love is ordinary.

Maybe love is a woman standing in the kitchen after a long day of work, chopping vegetables because she knows her child needs them.

Maybe love is remembering what someone needs before they remember it themselves.

My mom never sat me down and said, “One day you’ll appreciate all these vegetables.”

She didn’t need to.

Because now, years later, sitting at the dining table during semester break, I find myself looking at my plate differently.

I don’t just see water spinach. I don’t just see sayur sop. I don’t just see sayur asem.

I see her.

I see the years of invisible labor hidden inside every meal. The grocery shopping. The planning. The cooking. The worrying. The constant mental checklist mothers seem to carry everywhere.

Did she eat enough?

Did she get enough vitamins?

Is she healthy?

Is she taking care of herself?

Questions I never heard out loud, yet somehow answered every day through food.

When people talk about love, they often describe extraordinary moments. The big sacrifices. The unforgettable memories. The life-changing conversations. But the older I get, the more I think love lives in the ordinary ones.

Love is someone making sure you eat vegetables.

Love is someone noticing your needs before they become problems.

Love is care repeated so many times that it becomes invisible.

And maybe that’s why we miss it.

Because we’re looking for fireworks while love is quietly standing in the kitchen, stirring a pot of soup, making sure there will be vegetables on the table tomorrow.

Waiting for us to realize what it has been doing all along.