Maybe

Envying people's lives sounds so naive. I thought as I got my own share of finer things in life, I could stop the evil feeling and instead, letting them envy mine for once.

Everywhere I go, I see people living the life I want to have. Ironically, they had never thought of ever leading the life they're recently having.

Like since I was very young, I'd always wanted to live in a foreign country. I've always been thirsty for adventures and the thought of living in a new place where nobody knows my family tree has always excited me. At least I can wear anything I want without having anyone giving me funny looks for violating Eastern values, my ID card will no longer have religion field which has to be filled since agnotism is not acceptable, and more importantly, nobody dares to start a small talk by asking my marital status.

When my peers were still busy dealing with boyfriends with raging hormones and raging tempers, I had been busy updating my online CV on JobsDB Singapore hoping I could find a job there. If I could make it in Singapore, I thought it would be easy to make it anywhere in the world. Even New York. But it turned out I never did reply any vacancies found by the website, for I had found a job in the city where I was born and grew up.

Then came along foreign boyfriends. Perhaps I had never loved them anyway. I might have gone out with them and gone through long distance relationships just for the sake of getting a ticket out of my country. I did travel most of Asian continent, when my peers didn't go as far as Java island.

And now when I still work for the same company, my ID card is still written 'catholic' at the religion field, and people are still feeling sorry for my husbandlessness, my peers are now sailing the Seine on her birthday, expecting another child in Japan and Canada, looking out for a new apartment in Newcastle, furnishing a newly re-inovated kitchen in San Francisco, having a get-away weekend to Bordeaux, taking German lessons in Frankfurt, working with a top advertising agency in NYC, doing documentary films by day and bar hopping by night in DC.

However, it's not all flowers living abroad. Maybe they're the ones who envy me after all, for at the end of my relatively short travels, I have a home - a house in South Jakarta and good friends - to come home to where everything is familiar again. And when it comes to food, nothing beats Indonesian food in Indonesia, though there are plenty Indonesian restaurants all over the world.

Maybe.