The news reached me in fragments, like waves carried across an ocean, their sound scattered by the wind. A headline popped onto my phone screen at midnight, glowing against the dark of my small apartment: “Indonesian leader pledges to revoke lawmakers’ perks after protests leave 6 dead.” I stared at the words as though they were written in smoke, difficult to grasp yet impossible to ignore. I could hear, faintly, the city of my childhood roaring on the other side of the world. But from here, thousands of miles away, all I had were images on screens and the sound of my own heartbeat as I scrolled through video after video.

It was the kind of distance that felt like exile. My body was safe, tucked away in a foreign country where the streets were quiet, but my mind was still back in Glodok

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