Like Tantalus, who could see everything with only his face above the water, looking up at a fruit that’s inches away, yet will never be picked by his own hands. So too, my body couldn’t reach for what’s so innocent yet so far away: love. The fruit that’s always inches away. One that haunts me in my dreams, or even while I’m wide awake, whether it’s a sunny day where warmth touches my skin on my ride, or rain that falls right through my glasses.
It’s like I’m drowning too. Not with water up to my neck, but suffocating enough to make me only see it from close —close enough to feel real, but never close enough to hold.
Love isn’t something scary, right? And yet it’s enough to terrorize me. To tremble my hands, my heart, my legs—enough to keep me at bay. It strikes quietly, and suddenly I find myself wondering if maybe, maybe this is what it is. I don’t know if it’s the laugh, the talks, the smiles, or anything in between. I don’t know what triggers it. I only know it haunts me enough to ask.
We walk in like we don’t know what we’re doing, and maybe that’s the point. The room shifts the way rooms do when something too alive enters it. People notice without meaning to. They can’t help it, and that’s always been the embarrassing part.
I keep trying to be quieter about you. Smaller. More manageable. I wear you like a secret stitched into the lining of a coat, one where nobody’s supposed to see it, and yet somehow the whole room is warm.
There is a particular exhaustion in loving someone this loudly in a world that asks you to love nothing at all, or at least more quietly, or at least differently than this. And still—here we are. Centerpiece. Not because we chose it. Because you can’t dim a thing that’s already decided to burn.
You know I’m a bad liar, our love should be
The brightest thing in the room, ooh
We’re the centerpiece in this room, oh
(Loud- Nmixx)
Our love should be the brightest thing in the room—should be, like someone taught us, there are kinds of brightness that need permission. Like we’ve been practicing hiding what was never meant to hide.
I think about hands. How yours finds mine the same way every time—without looking, without needing to look, like it’s a choreography we learned in another life and carried over. Nobody taught us this. We just knew.
The chandelier doesn’t apologize for casting light on everything. Neither should we. Am I the one meant to carry this? To feel something that sits so right yet so wrong inside me? Do I deserve it? Will I ever find something like this again? Am I a fool for even wondering? Do the gods allow such things to happen to someone like me?
Every small chance I get, I want to hide from it. To act like it’s nothing—to push it aside, out of sight, before anyone sees. Before I even have to see it too clearly.
And there it is. The confession that slips through before the hiding catches up. Because I do like it. I like it the way you like sunlight through a window you were told not to open: warm, undeniable, slightly dangerous, yours anyway.
Hiding it doesn’t make it smaller. I’ve tried. I’ve catalogued my expressions in mirrors, rehearsed indifference, trained myself to look at you the way I look at streetlights—necessary, unremarkable, just there. It doesn’t work. You are not a streetlight. You are the kind of thing that makes people stop walking.
So, why do we hide it?
Because somewhere between being born and being taught how to want things, someone drew a small, firm circle and said: only this much. only this kind. only this way. And I was obedient for a long time. I kneeled. I kept the water at my neck and called it floating.
But you can’t unknow a thing once it’s sat beside you on a Tuesday evening and made the whole room feel like it was built specifically for that moment. You can’t unhear yourself laughing like that. You can’t unfeel the specific weight of being chosen by something you didn’t have a name for yet.
So, no. I can’t act like I don’t like it. Even now. Even when liking it means carrying it in places where I’m supposed to be empty. Even when liking it is its own kind of rebellion—quiet, private, persistent as a weed through concrete.
Maybe I’m not drowning because love is impossible. Maybe I’m drowning because I keep listening to the voice that tells me I’m undeserving of it. Maybe reaching for something isn’t about guaranteeing you’ll have it—maybe it’s just proof that you’re alive enough to try.
You told me to shh, but you make me wanna love you loud
Need a microphone and speaker just so I can scream it out
(Loud- Nmixx)
I have been practicing smallness my whole life. Shrinking sentences before they leave my mouth, swallowing names, learning which silences are safe and which ones are just survival.
They said shh—not always in words. Sometimes it was just the way a room got still. The way a joke landed, and I laughed along. The way I learned to fold myself into something easier to carry.
And I got good at it. God, I got so good at it. Quiet in the doorways. Be careful at the dinner table, loving in the margins, in lowercase, in pencil, half-erased. But then—you.
And something in me broke open, in the way that isn’t breaking. The way a window does when finally, finally, someone lets the air in. I don’t want to be careful with you.
I don’t want to love you in a language that is built for hiding, talking with coded glances, plausible deniability, the art of almost saying it.
I want a microphone.
I want a speaker tower.
I want the whole building to know.
I want to say your name, as it belongs in my mouth, like it always did. like I’ve been saving it on the tip of my tongue since the beginning.
They told me to keep it down, and maybe I understood why, once. Maybe I even agreed.
But you exist. warm and real and right here, and I cannot whisper something this true. So let me be loud. Let me be embarrassing and obvious and so completely gone for you.
Let me love you like I’m not sorry for it. Like the apology was never mine to give. Like the silence was never what I actually wanted.
I want to scream it,
I want it to echo,
I want it to reach every version of me,
who was fifteen and terrified and already in love with the ‘wrong’ one and didn’t have the words yet.
So (let’s conclude before I yearn too much), maybe Tantalus wasn’t being tortured by the fruit. Maybe he was being tortured by his own stillness by the part of him that kept choosing to stay in the water instead of climbing out entirely, wet and ridiculous and free. Maybe that’s why the fruit never reached him. Not because the gods pulled it away, but because he never learned that wanting something means moving for it. Stretching until your muscles tear. Leaving the water behind, even if your legs shake afterward.
Ditulis oleh Ken
Diedit oleh Alya Fitri Ramadhani
Didesain oleh Laya Nasywa Az Zahra
