Some thoughts from an ex-international student who’s currently missing their friends

It’s been almost two months since I left my postgraduate program in Trieste. I found myself thinking about that sentence in the title, once in a while, as I’m continuing my life back in Indonesia. I try to be mindful, to cherish the opportunity to be present in my own home country. Then, I learned to find a balance, to also keep nurturing my connection to the friends I lived with for a year before.

A friend brings a new universe

Back in 2020, I found an excerpt from Anais Nin’s diary:

Each friend represents a world in us,

a world possibly not born until they arrive,

and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."

I haven’t read her diary. However, after passing through that quote, I kept it tenderly within me so I can always treat my new friends with such grace. I found myself holding on to this wish strongly as I started my postgraduate study in ICTP alongside many peers from different countries.

By the end of my first month, I reflected after a long run:

“… what helped me the most are the people, the international students here. My favorite thing to be here is … the community I can find in this institution.

I felt like talking to a long lost friend right away with my roommate who showed me everything I need to know. On the first day of my meeting with my classmates, we got stranded in the city and laughed through the struggle of navigating a city with a language we haven’t understood. I felt right in place while cooking and sharing culture with people from different continents.

I feel hopeful for my time here. I know I will learn more things through just one year compared to my previous years and I hope I can take a piece of something from everyone I have met here.”

Fast forward to a year later, I’m grateful to say that the thoughts stood strong through time. I could not stop to thank the universe that I was surrounded with kind peers. I could put my heart out there and it was equally matched. I’d say I received even more as I learned more about myself and picked myself up over and over again because of my friends.

With the spirit of taking a piece from each of our friend, Bee and I wrote speeches that elaborated this more.

Sharing language and culture

A new form of love language that I experienced with my international friends is to share language and culture. There’s something special about presenting something to remind your friend about their home country. It’s as simple as greeting a friend with their own language.

It’s buenos días in the morning and no, you should not say buenos mañanas to Spanish speakers. Apparently, the longest birthday message might come from Madagascar with tratry ny tsingerintaona nahaterahana.

We can call cute chubby things as gürbüz in Turkish, which we used to call the big golden fish in a nearby lake. Both Indonesians and Filipinos can compliment each other by saying kambing!

I should be careful in Senegal because jakarta means motor bikes instead of my country’s capital city. Indonesians are so dramatic with affection that we say thank you by terima kasih, as in I shall receive your love or please take my love. However, I should refrain saying terma (similar pronounciation) in Algeria because it’s a swear word there, oops.

I automatically laughed when my friend tried to speak Bahasa Indonesia by saying orangutan, pagi! My friends really made the best out of the simple words I taught them.

I usually found myself to be the only in the Indonesian in the room through my study. Previously, it made me anxious to feel out-of-place. However, I learned that a sense-of-belonging transcends languages and cultures. With the correct people, we connect by trading pieces from our cultures. In the end of the day, we’re not so different. We hate our government, we love a good food, we share some pop cultures, and we are here to grow within our own endeavor.

The sufficiency of “This made me think of you”

I wrote this page after thinking of the impossibility to meet my friends for a long time. There’s only so much that a graduate student could do, definitely not crossing countries that many times. I could only miss them from my space here, across different time zones and daily activities. I try to reconcile with the fact that we’re all moving in different paces and directions. And I found peace with these short texts.

A quick “How are you?” easily made my day. No, I can’t expect a long rant just like the old days when I could stop my friend in the hallway to listen to my day. However, to know someone in another corner of the world thought of me is enough.

For me, to love is to remember and so I get excited by finding tiny things in life that remind me of my friends. Dropping these short messages is enough to keep the connections.

I will live by nurturing these small connections with my friends. I know I couldn’t follow along everything, but I hope they all know that I’m rooting for any step of their life (read section of “A sense of community and a different kind of love” here). And I could only wish for a chance that our space and time intersect with each other again.