New York City, 2014 II.

Ayu
6 min readJul 12, 2021

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Something that Elio learned from knowing Julie for approximately 4 months, she’s a hard worker. Despite having to commute from her apartment in lower Manhattan to her university in South Harlem, she would still make time to go to Elio’s apartment in Brooklyn after her classes finished, talking about yet another creep on the subway or a rat that she found dead in the middle of the road (she’d sometimes take pictures of them and send them to Elio in the middle of her commute.)

He’d ask her sometimes when they’re eating pizza in Brooklyn Bridge Park if she wanted to drive to university sometimes — or if she wanted him to drive her (to get rid of all the subway creeps and weirdos) but she’d always say no, she enjoys the commute no matter how annoying all the white guys could be. Elio laughed at her response every single time.

Another thing Elio learned from her, she likes to double-tie her shoelaces — sometimes his too when she’s bored — and she does this because she’s too scared of tripping and falling onto the ground because she knew all kinds of diseases that New York grounds possessed. Which is a sort of bizarre thing to do considering the cause behind them but Julie’s always been the eccentric one between the two.

He also learned that her favourite type of food is Indian dishes, preferably the one in Columbus Avenue — Angaar — because their curry is to die for; her favourite drink is the strawberry milkshake from Shake ‘n Shack. And on his birthday in February, Julie gave her one of the very first prints of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein because she knew how obsessed he was with the book.

She took him places that he’d never been before — Comedy Cellar where he had to sit down and listen to a bunch of ‘actors’ improving for two and a half hours but all of it is worth it because he gets to spend it with her. He also took her places she’d never been before — Broadway, to Wicked, where she had to hold in her screams for the entirety of the show because she just couldn’t believe that Elio got tickets to see it.

And after meeting Julie, living in New York City didn’t seem like such a tedious routine anymore because every day with her is a fucking roller-coaster and an adventure that he’d never trade with anything else. There are a lot of things that they did together other than finding out more cafes in Brooklyn or trying to make Upper East Siders insecure when they threw them judgmental looks whenever they pass by — sometimes they’d spend the weekend in Elio’s Brooklyn apartment, baking cookies even when they both suck at it. Sometimes, too, he’d spend the night at hers, talking about conspiracy theories until the late morning.

Naturally, Elio introduced her to his friends because the first time they met her he merely said she was someone he ‘found’ on the subway and she didn’t quite interject but after a few weeks he finally introduced her as Julie — just Julie. Ten and Lucas didn’t seem to mind her presence because she was damn good at Charades and always seemed to lose in Uno. She’s also very very smart, going to Columbia does that.

When May rolled around and Julie finally graduated, Elio came — dressed in an expensive suit he bought at Fifth Avenue the night before and a huge bouquet of pink tulips. She asked him where he got such a fresh batch and he didn’t have the heart (or the guts) to say that he flew them in from Amsterdam last night, picking them up from JFK in the morning.

Like every other ‘tourists’, Julie was carefree and she didn’t want anything to tie her down and that’s how Elio never really asked her out — they were never official to begin with. It’s not like he minded because he could stay committed to her and vice versa. They just kind of assumed everyone was on the same page and knew that they were both off the market. (Wrong assumption to make, everyone thought they were just really good friends who hooked up once in a while because it’s New York.)

Their ‘friendship’ reached its peak in June, when they were both in Julie’s apartment. Her Crosley vinyl player was playing Arctic Monkeys’ ‘Do I Wanna Know’ and he was holding his cigarette in between his right pointer and middle finger and she was dragging hers like the world was ending the next day — dancing around like a pair of fools on the hardwood floor, dragging their feet around even when they knew it’d form blisters the next day. He looked at Julie, her small smile, her long black hair, the smoke coming out of the cigarette in between her lips and thought to himself what it’d be like to kiss her.

She stopped dancing for a while and as Alex Turner sang, “Cause the nights are mainly made for saying things that you can’t say tomorrow day.” She took a few steps towards him, cigarette now in hand and leaned into him — because although he’s a towering 6 foot, Julie was 5’11”, making her the second tallest person in their small circle — and pressed their lips together.

It’s not that Elio felt nothing — it was just how everything after that happened so fast. His cigarette in the ash-tray, her skirt hitched up, his jacket on the floor, his teeth sinking into her skin, her nails digging into his back. It’s not that Elio didn’t feel anything — he just didn’t have the time to process it all.

The next time they spent time together was in Elio’s apartment when she woke up in the middle of the night, tucked a few strands of Elio’s hair behind his ears and whispered the three little words. “I love you.” But he pretended to be asleep because he didn’t want to lie to her and tell her that he didn’t feel the same way… yet.

In July when he finally graduated and he asked her to go to a Yankees match with him — they went. When Masahiro Tanaka hit a home run and the stadium erupted in roars and cheers, he wanted to tell her that he loved her, finally. But then he decided he’d tell her somewhere more private, where he knew she’d hear every syllables behind his words.

And so he finally said it when they took a late-night walk in Central Park, “Gue sayang lo.”

Julie smiled, “Can you say it in English so it doesn’t sound as cringy?”

Elio laughed a little, “I love you, Columbia.”

She nodded, “I love you too, NYU.”

For a second and a half when his lips were against hers — everything felt perfect and calculated. And maybe that night in Central Park became their downfall — because they were both still young and still figuring out themselves but in the midst of the moment and the need for constant company in a city as ruthless and big as New York, they thought they’d fallen in love with one another.

In September when they both packed up their things (and their lives) in New York to fly back to Jakarta — they realized that the feelings they felt for one another shifted, for the worse. But they tried to relive it, as much as possible.

But they knew, deep down, it’d never be the same.

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Ayu
Ayu

Written by Ayu

20 | just the ballad of me and my brain.

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