nightride.

At exactly 12.55am this morning, a pair of cats were having a fight over a garbage pile just in front of Hotel Dian, jalan Parangtritis.

It was not exactly then, but a few minutes later or perhaps earlier, that I passed by them with my bike.

I looked at them but they ignored me.

Jogja past midnight doesn’t feel at all like Bajawa past midnight. Somehow at first I felt unsafe, but I didn’t know why. Under the railway between Puskat and Gardu PLN, a car was stopping and some people were out. It was quite an awkward position for a car to stop right there in the middle of the night. Except for letting someone very drunk to shove their heads out and vomit, of course. Or a lot of other possibilities that I didn’t think of.

After I passed by the Gardu PLN, I thought that as usual people would just see me as a Japanese tourist. Somehow, however, that thought calmed me down. Somehow I thought people would be nicer to tourists here.

–

I used to walk through the quiet town to get home past midnight in Bajawa. There was this intersection not long after our office. Then the Wartel where I used to make my calls from. Then another intersection, then the prison. I’ve never been in the prison in Bajawa, now I realized. I should go there at one point.

Then, after the prison, there would be just this long strip of boulevard-like road with some grass in the middle strip.

–

One night, I walked back home past midnight as usual, and no one, as usual, were on the road. All the streets in town was completely empty, and it is as though I was the only one breathing in town. Everyone else was snoring. Or something like that.

In a distance, however, I could vaguely discern an unusual shape in the middle of the road. It was a black something. I thought it wasn’t moving, until I walked a bit closer to it, when I realized that it was breathing (like myself) and even chewing.

It was a horse. A black, or at least dark-coloured, horse, in the middle of the street, when everyone else was snoring, eating the grass at the little strip in the middle of the boulevard-like road.

My heart started to race. It was such a peculiar view. I have walked this route for months and this was the first time I saw something as peculiar as a horse in the middle of the dark street of Bajawa, eating the grass ever so elegantly.

In my head I told myself lots of stories to convince myself that I was still walking home. That I was not in a dream. I don’t remember what the stories were, but I know that they didn’t help. I still found the horse peculiar. So I slowed down.

The horse was eating the grass very normally. In broad daylight I would easily believe my eyes, but past midnight, it was like a dream. I started to think about the meanings of horses in dreams. I tried to look back to see whether I had passed another horse, perhaps, like ten meters before this one. No, there were no other horse. No, there were no one back there saying “surpriiiise!” after having followed me with a camera.

That’s when I looked to the side of the road and saw a man sitting there. He looked real. I greeted him, “Selamat malam, Oom,” yes, every man is your uncle in this island. And he greeted back. He was waiting on that horse.

Lucky I didn’t try to touch the horse. It might have just disappeared to thin air, together with its man, or uncle or whatever, and I wouldn’t be able to live my life the way I’m leading it now. Or the man might think I was going to steal his horse and I wouldn’t be able to live my life the way I’m living it now. Or, the man could have just laughed at my silliness, leaving myself embarassed, and I wouldn’t be able to live my life the way I’m living it now.

Whatever happened, I am always lucky.