The Agony

June 2003. The air in Jakarta hung thick and heavy, like a wet blanket pressing down on everything. I was eleven, small for my age, with scraped knees from chasing games and a head full of nothing but school bells, hopscotch grids, and the endless afternoons blurring into one another.Jessie lived next door - the perfect little girl parents dreamed up: long black hair swaying like silk, eyes bright with mischief. She was nine, my shadow in every game. Every day after school, we’d claim her front yard as our kingdom. Dollhouses from scavenged boxes. Pretend kitchens with mud pies and, yeah, worms sizzling on imaginary stoves. Disgusting? Sure, but that’s childhood before screens stole the dirt from our hands.

That afternoon burned hotter than most. Sweat glued my uniform to my skin as Jessie, and I stirred our “stew.” Then he appeared - Denny, Jessie’s older brother, maybe fifteen, lanky with a lazy smile that didn’t reach his eyes. He drifted over like the heat itself, hands in his pockets. “Hey, girls. Cooking up trouble out here?”Jessie lit up, chattering like always, pulling me into the warmth of it. I mumbled something, shy around boys. Denny chuckled, wiping sweat from his brow. “Too hot for this. Come play inside my room. I’ve got a movie. Cooler in there.”It sounded innocent. A big brother looking out for his sister, shielding us from the sun’s bite. No alarms in my kid-brain. Jessie bounced ahead, and I followed, heart light with the promise of AC and cartoons.

His room smelled of boy-stale socks and cheap soap-tidy enough, bed made, TV flickering static. Jessie claimed the far corner of the floor, knees hugged to her chest, oddly quiet. I perched on the bed’s edge, no room left. Denny slid a disc into the player, dropped beside me..too close..and hit play.

The screen glowed to life. A woman, naked, twisting with a man. Moans crackled through the speakers. My stomach flipped. This wasn’t cartoons. This was wrong, a poison seeping into the room. Heat flushed my face, but not from the weather. “What... what movie is this?” I forced out, voice tiny.“Blue movie,” he said casually, like naming a flavor of ice cream. His hand clamped mine then-hot, insistent-guiding it between my legs. Revulsion hit me hard. I froze. Jessie still had not moved. She stared at the floor. Denny’s grip tightened. Suddenly the room felt too small.Panic surged like fire. I yanked free, legs pumping before my brain caught up. Burst through the door, half-running, tears stinging the corners of my eyes-one blink, and they’d betray me. The yard blurred. Friendship with Jessie? Shattered. Laughter with her family? Poisoned. I slammed into my house, my room, and burrowed under the covers.

Parents couldn’t know. Ours were tangled in barbecues and shared holidays-best friends, their worlds woven tight. Telling meant unravelling everything. So, I shoved it all into a black box deep inside, locked it with regret and shame. Wishing I could erase the worms, the heat, his touch.

But some boxes won’t stay buried. This is where my story cracks open.

--

Three years passed after Denny, quiet as shadows growing longer.Nothing big happened. Or maybe too much happened in silence.Life kept going after the pain - cold, almost mean in its normal routine.I went to school every morning, uniform neatly ironed, homework shoved in my bag unfinished. My brother and sister fought over TV channels. My parents hid in work, bills, and daily chores. We still had family barbecues. Still smiled for photos. Still laughed loud so neighbors thought we were okay.Jessie’s family stayed next door.I’d see her hanging laundry or watering plants in the afternoon heat. We never talked about what happened in Denny’s room. Not once. It turned into a memory we buried deep, pretending it couldn’t breathe anymore.I got good at that silence.

By fourteen, I could swallow hard feelings before they came out.Then Josh showed up - not loud, but soft.A friend introduced us after school. Suddenly, he walked beside me on busy sidewalks full of people. His talk flowed easy; silence never felt weird with him.Josh wasn’t like movie stars. No flowers every day, no poems under my window. He was just kind.And kindness sticks when your life taught you to expect the worst.He picked me up from school when he could. Took me to cheap movies in crowded malls, where the AC froze our skin. He’d buy dinner, street food or simple noodles, and say sorry if it wasn’t great, like I cared. All I wanted was him sitting across, asking about my day.He really listened when I talked.Back then, that felt like love..scary and real.My friends loved him right away. Teachers too. Even strangers trusted him fast. His eyes were honest; lying seemed impossible.That’s why what I did to him still haunts me.

My mother never liked us together.No yelling at first. No big forbids. Her dislike came quiet: little comments at dinner, sharp sighs when his name came up, heavy silence that made me feel bad for being happy.Josh was Chinese-Indonesian.My dad was too.But Mom carried old anger she never said out loud..maybe from marriage, or hurts that built up. Pain needed a place to land.No matter how good Josh was, she saw his background first. Not his heart.

At sixteen, I wanted her approval more than love.So I ended it. Just like that.No big fight. No cheating. Nothing dramatic.I just said, “We shouldn’t keep going.”I still see his confused face.“What did I do wrong?” he asked, voice soft.Nothing.That was the worst part.He did nothing wrong.But I couldn’t tell him the truth without feeling ashamed. Ashamed of picking family peace over him. Ashamed that love felt small next to their rules.

So I gave vague answers. Scared, maybe.

Josh didn’t fight much. He just stared, like solving a puzzle with missing pieces.Days later, friends said he called them. Crying. Asking if I ever really loved him.That question hurts more than the breakup.Because I did love him.I think so.I loved how he slowed down when my shoes hurt my feet. Loved how he held my hand tight crossing busy Jakarta streets. Loved his voice, still clear years later when other memories fade.

But I left anyway.

Life went on.

That’s the strange part of heartbreak.The world doesn’t stop for it.Good people slip away not from love’s end..but fear’s arrival first.

--

By seventeen, graduation hit fast-too fast.My classmates buzzed about college exams, campus life, new friends waiting. Their futures glowed bright, doors wide open.Mine crumbled behind closed ones.

Dad’s clothing business started failing months before. At first, no one told us kids much. Just whispers behind doors. Long silences at dinner. More bills piling on the table.Then the big betrayal.A supplier cheated Dad out of a huge chunk of cash..money we couldn’t lose.After that, everything fell apart quick.The car went first.Then the motorbikes.Then machines from the factory.Pieces of our life vanished so slowly, losing stuff almost felt normal.

Dad changed too.He’d always been proud-fixed problems alone before we noticed. But going broke emptied him out, turned pride to panic.Panic makes bad choices sound smart.He started gambling.At first, I think he believed he could recover everything quickly. One lucky turn. One miracle. One final chance to restore the life slipping through his fingers.But gambling feeds on hope the same way fire feeds on oxygen.It left us with nothing.

By then, my friends were preparing for college.Meanwhile, I was learning how to survive disappointment quietly.I remember staring at university brochures late at night after everyone slept, tracing my fingers across smiling girls photographed beneath campus buildings they belonged to.I wanted that life so badly it physically hurt.I wanted assignments. Cafeteria lunches. Group projects. Complaints about professors. I wanted exhaustion born from studying instead of survival.Instead, I started working immediately after high school.Usher jobs. Event promotions. Anything willing to pay enough to help my family breathe a little longer.Sometimes after work, I watched girls my age laughing together outside cafés with branded shopping bags hanging from their arms. They complained about exams while checking brand-new phones their parents bought them.Meanwhile, I saved money carefully just to afford secondhand things other people no longer wanted.

And God, I hated myself for being jealous.Deep down, I knew I had more than many.Food on the table.A bed.Walls against the rain.But grief is complicated when you are young.At seventeen, gratitude and resentment can live inside the same body at once.And both feel real.I think that was the year I stopped feeling like a child entirely.

The divorce happened on an ordinary night.That was what made it terrifying.No thunderstorm outside. No dramatic screaming echoing through the house. No shattered plates or slammed doors warning us beforehand.I’d just got home from work - beat, sticky from Jakarta heat, cheap heels rubbing blisters on my feet. Sis came soon after. Bro was there.My mother called us into the living room.“Sit down,” she said.Nothing about her voice sounded unusual at first.We sat on the floor, legs crossed. Parents in chairs facing us. Dad looked too quiet..elbows on knees, hands tight, eyes far away.I thought: more money trouble.Another bill.Another disaster.Another thing we would have to survive.Then my mother inhaled slowly and said:“Your father and I are getting divorced.”Just like that.Twenty-five years of marriage reduced to a single sentence.

I don’t remember who cried first.

Maybe my sister.

Maybe me.

Maybe all of us at once.

The room blurred almost immediately after the word divorce entered the air. I only remember fragments after that-my mother explaining things carefully, my father staying mostly silent, my brother staring at the floor as if looking at us directly might make everything more real.

They said they tried.Couldn’t go on.Too much broken between them.Money cracked it wide open.

I wanted to scream.

Not from surprise.

From being sick of new pains.

I was seventeen.Seventeen felt too young to watch your family collapse and too old to beg the world to stop collapsing anyway.All my friends were stepping into adulthood excitedly.I felt dragged into it by force.That night, after everyone finally disappeared into separate rooms, I lay awake staring at the ceiling for hours, listening to the strange silence settling over the house.It sounded different after the word divorce had been spoken aloud.As if the walls themselves understood something irreversible had happened.And somewhere in the middle of that endless night, I realized something terrifying:Love, in every form I had known it, always seemed to leave eventually.