Mango
Two-story house, one bedroom –
cramped and tiny, one person too many.
At the heart of the capital,
a maze of narrow alleys,
no one’s rich enough to be unhappy,
no one’s too well-off to ignore others.
Three-year-old me knew how
to unlock the front door,
and escape to the house next door
before the sun had risen.
The old lady who lived alone
would hand me frozen tea.
We’d sit together on her terrace,
watching the dark sky fade to pale blue.
Our alley was named
after a fruit –
the district, forest of wood –
yet no trees grew
on the concrete.
And that house – my earliest memory –
is where I learned that adults, too, could cry,
when I saw my mother, seated
on a bamboo bed in the living room,
silently shedding tears.
She looked at me and smiled,
and in that moment, I learned
how adults love to pretend
everything is okay.
Jiji Lubis is a journalist and columnist based in Jakarta, Indonesia. She is a managing editor at the Indonesian chapter of a global non-profit science communication media. An occasional hermit with seven cats, she writes poetry to understand her own emotions, focusing on therapeutic writing to cope with prolonged mental illness. Self-taught and not writing in her mother tongue, she strives to write in accessible language without losing the essence of poetry-making.