I didn’t write this because I think I can rescue the past. I wrote it because I don’t trust how power teaches us to remember.

The stories we inherit are rarely innocent. They arrive already arranged by someone’s interests, already smoothed into the language of order: protocol, necessity, stability, unity. Even grief is managed. Even love is filed away as either a private indulgence or a convenient symbol. But I have learned to be suspicious of anything that calls itself “restoration” while asking real bodies to disappear into the margins. I have learned that when people in authority insist a rupture is “clean,” it usually means someone else is carrying the mess.

This prose is my refusal of that language of order.

I wanted to write from inside a rupture, not to romanticise it, but to insist that the intimate is never separate from the political. I’m a leftist at heart, which mostly means I’m allergic to the way hierarchy launders itself into tradition. I’m wary of the moral vocabulary that comes pre-installed in courts, states, and institutions, the vocabulary that says: accept your place, lower your voice, make your pain respectable. The older I get, the more I understand that “order” is often just a story told by the powerful to make domination feel inevitable, even virtuous.

And still, I’m not writing this from a distance. I’m writing it because I love you. And the fact of that matters in the way the world makes meanings, assigns rank, decides which relationships are legible and which are treated as a disruption to be corrected. Loving you has made me more attentive to how borders are policed, not only by soldiers or laws, but by softer instruments: etiquette, expectation, the quiet threat of being made ridiculous. It has made me see how easily a living person can be reduced to a function in someone else’s narrative.

What I’m trying to protect in this piece is not a romance. It’s a kind of truth that power cannot stand because it can’t easily use it: the truth that tenderness can be sovereign without becoming ownership. That love can exist without annexation. That a relationship can refuse the logics of tribute and still be real.

The sanskrit lines are not there as proof or reconstruction. They are there as weight. As breath. As another register of thought. I’m drawn to the ritual language because it slows everything down; it refuses the speed at which institutions want to conclude, to categorise, to move on. In that register, love isn’t just feeling. It becomes practice. It becomes discipline. It becomes the decision to keep faith with what happened, even when the world rewards you for forgetting.

I keep returning to one stubborn conviction: separation is never as total as those in power pretend it is. They can place people in different rooms, give them different duties, teach them how to look away from one another in public. They can rename what you shared into something smaller: a mistake, a rumour, a misunderstanding, a threat to “stability.” But they cannot reach back into the moments that already passed. They cannot undo the way a presence can settle a body, how it can teach you to breathe more slowly, how it can make you feel—briefly, dangerously—unruled.

That is what I’m writing from: the body as an archive that refuses to be bound to confiscate.

If this piece has a politics, it is not the politics of slogans. It is the politics of insisting that the human is not collateral. That love is not a decorative subplot to the real story of power. That history is not only the record of who ruled, but also of what was forced to be quiet in order for ruling to look clean.

And if this piece has a personal stake, it is this: I want to stay loyal to my own capacity for love. Not only to you, my love, but to what all of my past has awakened in me—the ability to hold another person without trying to own them, the ability to be softened without being made smaller. I don’t want power, in its loud or subtle forms, to train that out of me. I don’t want the world to convince me that what is tender must also be private, hidden, apologetic.

I wrote this as a hymn because I don’t know another form sturdy enough. A hymn doesn’t argue its way into truth; it stays with truth until the reader has to feel it. It holds grief without making it consumable. It blesses what survives, even when survival looks like silence.

And I wrote it personally, because my love for you is not an abstraction. It is hands. It is voice. It is the way he becomes realer in my mind the more the world insists he should be a footnote. If I’m honest, part of me wrote this out of fear: fear that the forces that make some lives smaller will succeed in shrinking what we had. But a larger part wrote it out of defiance: the quiet kind, the kind that doesn’t announce itself, the kind that endures.

Let the institutions keep their tidy endings. Let them call it balance.

I want something else. A record that refuses to cooperate with erasure, a language that keeps faith with the body, and a blessing. That can be carried across water without asking permission.

That, for me, is what love looks like when it refuses to become tribute.

There was a time, before banners learned to bruise the air, when the sea between lands felt like a held breath, not a wound. It was then I met you, quiet as coral at low tide, whose words moved with the patience of water learning stone

We spoke first of small things—winds, harbors, the temper of horses—but meaning gathered where we did not point. Between us grew a knowing that had no room.

Love does not ask permission from adat; it only asks whether it may endure.

We did not name what it was. We learned to speak without witnesses. We learned to speak as if the air itself might report us. We learned that the word samaya, a meeting, can weigh more than any vow, because it is not promised. It is simply returned to, again and again, until it becomes a law inside the body.

I watched you walk the shore at sandikala, when the day unclasps its hands and the sea turns the color of old bronze. The wind made no announcement. The water did not applaud. You chanted under your breath, a hymn:

Om ring segara miwah ring buana, sukha miwah duhkha satunggil.

In sea and land, joy and sorrow are one.

I believe you.

So let me speak it now, plainly, as if plainness itself were a kind of offering.

I love you.

I love you as a living being, with the heat of your hands still on mine, with the sound of your voice still moving inside my chest. I love you not as an idea, not as a story I tell myself in solitude, but as a presence. As weight. As breath.

Here, at the edge of breath, I see it clearly.

Ring peteng miwah ring cahya, tresna tan kasukat.

In darkness and in light, love has no measure.

Here, the old words still move me. I know what stands between us.

But listen to me.

Even if they succeed in pulling us apart, it will not happen all at once, and it will not be clean. Separation is never as complete as those in power pretend it is. They can place us in different spaces, give us different duties, make us look away from each other in public. That much they are skilled at.

What they cannot do is reach into the moments that have already passed.

They cannot undo the way your presence settled me. They cannot take back the hours when I felt no need to perform my name, or carry my rank like a shield. Those things do not vanish simply because they are no longer permitted. They remain—quietly—in the body, where banners and commands do not reach.

If I am made to walk forward as if you were never there, I will walk. But what steadies my step will not be what they imagine:

Om ring segara miwah ring langit, rwa bhineda tan pegat.

In sea and sky, the two are not broken.

They spoke of kerta, of balance restored, of why certain names must not be repeated. They said grief should be private. They said love that crossed crowns had misread the world.

I listened. I survived.

I speak to the water as I once spoke to you. If I am made to deny this, I will deny it with my voice, not with my body. The body keeps its own record. The body remembers where it learned to breathe more slowly.

If you never hear this, then let it still exist. Let it rest where the sea carries words without asking who they belong to, where salt keeps what it touches, where stone holds heat long after the sun has gone.

Tresna tan sirna ring kala.
Love does not vanish into time.

If there is a realm beyond crowns and consequence, meet me there without a title. If there is none, then let this be enough: that after the field, after the steel, after the careful words, love continued—unarmed, unruled, and unrepentant.

When pressed, I answer with silence. Silence, too, can be faithful.

Dumogi santi ring segara, santi ring ati
May there be peace in the sea, peace in the heart.

I remain—not your subject, not your survivor, but the one who learned how to answer by living.

@abigailimuria

Abigail Limuria on Instagram: "😊"

The Temptation of Retreating From a Failing State

There is a pattern I’ve watched unfold over the last few years, even decades. When people live through enough institutional failure, something in them shifts. They stop expecting improvement. They start lowering their hopes to avoid further disappointment. Eventually they settle into a quiet rhythm of survival: fix what you can, ignore what you cannot, protect the few things that still make sense. In the short term, that strategy feels strangely liberating. It gives you back a sense of control that the political system has denied you. It allows you to breathe around problems that otherwise feel too vast to confront.

But this “turn inward” doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it sits on top of an entire ideological infrastructure that has, for years, been telling us that we are each a tiny, self-contained project of perseverance. Under neoliberalism, people are trained to think of themselves as micro-capitalists, responsible for optimising their own lives, their own “resilience”, their own marketability, their own mental health. Structural failures are reframed as personal challenges to be overcome through grit, hustle, and a positive mindset. Resilience becomes less about communities resisting injustice and more about individuals adjusting themselves to whatever violence the system throws at them.

What looks like a coping mechanism at the individual level is, at the systemic level, a convenient way to keep things running without ever fixing the underlying machinery. Each time citizens take on responsibilities that should be held by the state, the state absorbs a subtle lesson: that people will cope no matter how badly it fails them. Flood survivors raising their own emergency funds, neighbours organising makeshift security after police refuse to intervene, communities building informal safety nets where public hospitals fall short—all of these acts emerge from necessity, but they also sit perfectly within a broader neoliberal script that celebrates “resilient communities” while quietly withdrawing public support.

The rhetoric of resilience and self-reliance turns predatory at this point: instead of being a language for collective survival and resistance, it becomes a tool for offloading risk downward. What should be read as evidence of systemic breakdown is rebranded as inspiring perseverance; stories that should provoke rage are packaged as feel-good proof that ordinary people can “rise above” anything. In that sense, the shift from public to private, from national responsibility to personal resilience, is not neutral—it is one of the main ways the current order protects itself from being fundamentally questioned.

The Hidden Politics Behind “Just Cope”

The more society adapts to compensate for governmental absence, the more that absence becomes politically invisible. At first it looks like ingenuity: people find workarounds, build informal systems, “get things done” without waiting for the state. Over time, though, these workarounds harden into a new common sense. What used to be understood as a public obligation slowly becomes reimagined as a matter of personal character: if you really cared, you’d organise your own safety, crowdfund your own healthcare, take responsibility for your own mental health.

This is the logic of responsibilisation, the quiet insistence that a “good” citizen is an enterprising self who copes, adapts, and never makes demands. Neoliberal culture wraps this in predatory optimism: it tells people to see their exhaustion as a growth opportunity, their abandonment as a chance to become more “resilient,” their grief as something to be managed through self-care routines rather than collective anger. In that atmosphere, even the language of care is hollowed out; instead of pointing us back to the structures that produce burnout and despair, it redirects us inward, asking us to breathe, meditate, optimise, purchase, and carry on.

Over time, the public loses its sense of what the state ought to provide because everyone has become accustomed to filling those gaps themselves. This is an erosion. And while individuals may feel stronger in their immediate circles, their collective leverage shrinks. Power does not recede alongside public engagement; it simply becomes more insulated, more opaque, and more unaccountable, buffered by a population that has been taught to treat structural breakdown as just another test of personal resilience.

That is why Abigail’s conclusion, however heartfelt, carries a political risk. When she suggests that criticism no longer matters and that our energy is better spent tending to the small things within our reach, she is not just describing a coping strategy, she is helping to naturalise a particular political arrangement: a state that fails, a public that adjusts, and a governing class that learns it can survive crisis after crisis without fundamentally changing. Once failure is accepted as immutable, crisis management stops being about repair and becomes a permanent mode of rule. The normalization of crisis—floods, blackouts, institutional scandals, policy collapses—gradually erodes any sense of what effective, legitimate governance might look like. Instead of asking why institutions keep breaking down, people are encouraged to ask why they themselves are not coping better.

In that climate, legitimacy decays in a strange, uneven way: the state loses moral authority in people’s hearts, but not necessarily its grip on power, because the very people who are disillusioned have also been convinced that withdrawal is the only realistic response. The sentiment may be born from fatigue, but its effect is a quiet endorsement of the idea that we should abandon the public realm because it has abandoned us. And that is precisely how a brittle, crisis-driven order manages to endure: not by convincing people it is just, but by persuading them that anything beyond survival in their own small corner is no longer imaginable.

The New Order Never Really Left

Yet the nation’s problems do not exist in a vacuum. They are the result of deliberate decisions about budgeting, governance, accountability, and power. The underfunded public services, the decaying infrastructure, the indifferent bureaucracies—none of these are acts of fate. They are choices, reinforced over decades, and choices can be changed. But they cannot be changed if those most harmed by them decide that change is no longer worth pursuing. Indonesia’s political history has trained citizens, over generations, to expect little and endure much.

The New Order spent three decades teaching people that the state was not a space of negotiation but a distant, punitive authority; that stability mattered more than justice; that good citizens adapted quietly. As Bourchier shows, this was not merely authoritarian technique but the deliberate reengineering of political subjectivity through the ideology of the “family-state,” which cast society as an organic whole under benevolent paternal leadership. In such a framework, political contestation becomes pathology, and obedience appears natural—a moral duty rather than a loss of rights.

After Reformasi, this legacy never fully dissolved. Power shifted, but the administrative culture—its caution, its opacity, its deep aversion to accountability—remained. The family-state’s conception of citizens as dependents survived in bureaucratic habits that expect compliance and in public attitudes shaped by decades of hierarchical socialization. Decentralisation brought political access closer to the people, but also multiplied sites of patronage and diffused responsibility so thoroughly that failures now feel everywhere and nowhere at once. In that environment, people learn to stop imagining the state as something that could work differently. They learn to cope instead. And coping, repeated long enough, becomes a worldview.

This is not an argument against small acts of care. They matter deeply. They hold communities together in the moments when institutions fail. Indonesia’s social fabric has always relied on gotong royong, mutual aid, informal networks that step in where the formal state falters. But when mutual aid becomes a permanent substitute for public obligation, it stops being a cultural strength and becomes evidence of political abandonment. Reformasi promised the strengthening of democratic institutions, yet the reality for most Indonesians has been a state that expects communities to fill its gaps while oligarchic interests fill its corridors.

The New Order’s organicist ideology also lives on here: citizens are subtly encouraged to understand social problems as familial burdens rather than political failures, reinforcing the idea that solutions must come from community, not from confrontation with authority. In this context, turning inwards—focusing on family, neighbourhood, ritual, and personal stability—feels natural, even necessary. But it also continues the long historical pattern of depoliticisation: the belief that the public realm is inherently dangerous, unchangeable, or irrelevant to everyday survival.

But care should never be mistaken for a sustainable political strategy, nor should it be treated as a replacement for public responsibility. When citizens turn entirely inward, focusing only on their gardens, their families, their private joys, the larger terrain is left undefended. Indonesia’s political elites have always benefited from a population that is exhausted, cautious, or preoccupied with survival. The New Order’s paternalism taught people to distrust dissent; today’s oligarchic democracy benefits from that lingering reflex.

From the bureaucratic labyrinth inherited from colonial rule to the authoritarian disciplining of political imagination in the 1970s and 80s, the message has been consistent: do not expect too much, and do not demand too loudly. That message still echoes today—not through censorship, but through fatigue. Through an accumulation of small disappointments that quietly convinces people that systemic change is impractical, even naïve. And in that resignation, the governing class finds its greatest insulation. The people who benefit from that abdication are rarely the ones suffering from the consequences of government neglect; they are the ones who flourish when public expectations remain low and criticism is dismissed as idealism rather than necessity.

Taking Back What Was Always Ours

To move forward, we need a politics that holds both truths at once: the necessity of caring for the people closest to us and the necessity of refusing to accept systemic failure as something we must simply adapt to. These layers do not cancel each other out; they sustain each other. The intimate work of community-building can coexist with, and even strengthen, the collective insistence that institutions must fulfill their obligations. Indonesia’s history shows that small-scale solidarity has always been a lifeline, but it also shows that solidarity alone has never shifted the architecture of power. Community can nourish political will, but it cannot substitute for it.

What Abigail captures beautifully is the emotional landscape of living under a dysfunctional state. What she underestimates is the cost of surrendering the public sphere to those who have already demonstrated how little regard they have for it. Exhaustion is real; withdrawal feels tempting. And in Indonesia, withdrawal is not just a personal response—it is a historical inheritance. For decades, citizens were taught that safety lay in obedience and that politics was the domain of powerful men, not ordinary people. The New Order’s paternalistic ideology—casting citizens as anak bangsa who must be guided, corrected, disciplined—left behind a quiet skepticism toward public action that persists even today. When people retreat from the political arena, they are not only responding to burnout; they are stepping into a cultural script designed to make retreat feel natural. But if we allow that withdrawal to harden into a worldview, we will wake up one day unable to recognize the line between coping and conceding.

We don’t need to believe we can save the entire nation by ourselves. But we do need to believe that the nation is not beyond saving—and that political collapse should never be met with private acceptance. The work of tending to what is small must continue, but it cannot be the only work we do. The public realm remains ours, even when it feels hostile. History shows that when citizens vacate the public sphere, other forces—oligarchic networks, opportunistic elites, bureaucratic cartels—move quickly to claim it. Authority rarely stays unoccupied. A depoliticised public is not neutral; it becomes the raw material through which unaccountable power grows. Leaving it uncontested only guarantees that it becomes even less hospitable than it already is.

If hope exists at all, it lies not in shrinking our scope of action but in refusing to let exhaustion dictate the limits of what we imagine is possible. Hope is political, not emotional. It expands when people refuse to treat crisis as normal, when they insist that decay is not destiny, and when they recognize that the distance between the world they inhabit and the world they desire is not a reason to retreat but a reason to step forward.

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