Friend Shock

Okay i am so damn bored right now. This is holiday, my boyfriend is still out of town, my family is busy with some guests coming to our ‘guest house’, and my friends….. Well they’re gone. So here I am, have nothing to do, and next to me there’s my lil sis, who just got back from watching 'Sherlock Holmes’ with a friend and now waiting for her other friends to pick her up to spend the evening. What a life.

I experience what I call as friend shock. It’s similar with culture shock, but it friends. I know, stupid…. But when you have nothing to do, sometimes your mind, or my mind, is getting weirder and weirder. Anyway, back to this friend shock thing, 6 months ago before I went to Singapore I had a lot of friends and a boyfriend. They always filled my day and evening. I always had things to do, watching movie, going to computer fair, watching theater, going somewhere far just to try the food, Karaoke, book store, coffee shop, and many more. Even when I didn’t have company, I just need to text one of them and off we go.

When I stayed in singapore, I made some new friends. Since we stayed in The same building, the time that I spent with friends was double the one I spent in Jogja. It’s like the time that I had was divided into 3, school time, me time, and friends time (studying is include somewhere in each of them :p).

There were not many things to do in Singapore actually, especially because I didn’t have much money. The cinema was double the price. The type of the theater was different. There’s no cheap coffee shop or cafe. As for shopping, no money no shopping. I think I explore orchard road more when I was a tourist compared to when I was a student.

Even though there’s not much to do, there were always people. I just need to go down to the common room and chill there. Fortunately the common room in my building was rarely empty. When we had test, everybody study. When we’re free, we played stupid games or talked about random things. When it’s Saturday night or Sunday, we just wait until someone popped out things like “let’s go Clarke quay” or “let’s go Arab street” or “wanna go vivo?” but the Favorite sentence in my last days was “let’s go utown!” haha….There were times when I felt the common room was boring. I took it back. Nothing is more boring than my life in the past couple weeks.

Now that I’m back, some things changed. My best friends from architecture department graduated (Alhamdulilah…). They are rather working or staying in their hometown. As for my friends from english department, well all of us finished all the class and focus in the final year project. They rarely go to campus. Same things happened to my friends outside campus, working, getting married, studying for master, bla bla bla. 

If there’s a thing called culture shock, then I now experiencing friend shock. I used to meet at least 1 friend every day. Every time I got bored I could text a lot of people or just crash in their boarding house. But now…. nobody. I can’t ask them to meet up when they have deadline to do or come to their boarding house gossiping when they are tired after work. 

At first I thought it might because of this exchange things. For the past 6 months I lived in a dorm where there are hundreds, maybe thousand students living altogether. But when Fela, one of my best friend, also experienced similar things, I realized that might not be the case. Fela is an architect, she works in Jakarta now. As written in her blog, she planned to go to Jogja on for New Year’s eve, to celebrate with us like last year. She then cancelled her plan and go back to her hometown instead because only few people available. We used to have a deadline for studio project at this time when we were still architecture students. We also had our exams in January. So everybody was here in Jogja, studying, drawing, designing, rendering, modelling, busy busy. But now,,,, no deadlines, no more exams, almost no reason to stay in this town. 

Fela wrote that as she grow older, her circle is getting smaller. She has workmates and new friends, but people that she can really talk to decrease. Mem, our close friend also in Jakarta, but it's impossible to meet her everyday. It is Jakarta anyway, we need at least 2 hours to go from one place to another.

It could be because of the work, or the city, or final year project, or maybe an exchange program. No matter what the reason is, there will be a time where everybody feels lonely and friendless, for me and her it is now.