The Color of Morning (working title)
an excerpt

When did it happen to me, this decision I would go so far away, would not stay in my village? Sometimes I think it was seeing Melati get pregnant with Osman, so quickly go from schoolgirl in her blue and white uniform, excited about some new literature lesson, to wife with baby and cleaning and cooking. Or I think maybe it was this trip to Jakarta with my father, just after Osman was born, this chance I had to see the big city and so many fancy women and see how big the world is. But really it was before any of that, I think. Some part of me always felt not quite at home in my village. This is why I rode my bike alone, I think. Rode out the flat dirt road past rice paddies on either side, past water buffalo wallowing in the brown water in the ditch beside the road, past small stands selling cigarettes and petrol and candy, little wooden stands just big enough for shade, and out to where there were no people, no houses, only fields and fields and the road stretching before me. Pushing on my pedals and breathing slow and steady, the sun hot on my face and my forearms, riding my bicycle just to feel alone, to prove to myself I could get away if I wanted to.

I don’t know what it was. If it was buying a Seventeen magazine one time and reading about America, or buying one Beatles tape at the Saturday market in town and playing it in the small tape deck in the living room while my parents and sister were asleep, playing it so quietly I had to press my ear to the speaker and they were whispering to me from within this tiny box, whispering, Help, I need somebody, Help, not just anybody, and feeling maybe it was me, I was the one somebody needed, or maybe I was the one needing someone. But somehow I seemed to always know that I would leave my home, and now I have left it, and come farther away than I ever would have imagined, and now that I am here, in this American city in American apartment with a silver CD player and this electric toothbrush Satrio bought me, and American clothes and American everything, now all I know is I feel more apart and more alone and more confused than ever I did when I was a teenager hoping and dreaming of leaving my home.