They say a horse keeps running even when the legs give out. What they don’t tell you is what happens to the rider.
Nobody tells you that healing has bad timing. I thought seven months would be enough. Generous, even — the kind of timeline that sounds reasonable when you say it out loud, the way a doctor gives you a window and you write it down and believe it because what else are you going to do. Seven months. Fine. I can work with that.
Seven months later, I am sitting on an island, and I am not fine.
The thing about the year of the Metal Horse is that it doesn’t ask whether you’re ready. The horse runs. That is what it does. Not because the road is clear, not because the destination is certain, not even because running feels good anymore — but because stopping, truly stopping, is the one thing a horse is not built to do. I am a Metal Horse. I know this the way I know my own name. And so I run. I have been running for seven months through terrain I did not choose, toward a version of myself I can only describe in the future tense.
“I miss how Jakarta shaped me. The city didn’t ask how you were feeling. It asked what you delivered.”
Jakarta made me. Not gently — Jakarta doesn’t do gentle — but efficiently, the way a good knife is made: pressure, heat, edge. The city taught me that performance is not a dirty word. That showing up on time is a form of respect. That contribution, whether it moves one needle or a hundred, gets seen. I remember closing a year that brought in nearly two billion rupiah and feeling something I can only describe as clean. Like I had earned the ground I was standing on. I miss that feeling the way you miss a place that was hard to live in but impossible not to love.
Then the island. And with it, the thing nobody puts on the relocation checklist: anxiety that arrives not with a dramatic entrance but as a slow leak. A long exhale that doesn’t finish. The constant, low-grade surveillance of every room you walk into, every message you read twice. The analysis that runs in the background of every interaction like a program you can’t quit, eating memory, making everything else slower.
I have been tired in ways that have nothing to do with sleep. The kind of tired that makes the gym feel like a philosophical question rather than a physical act. The kind of tired that Meredith Grey would recognize — not the tiredness of having worked too hard, but the tiredness of having trusted too openly, of having left a door unlocked that someone chose to walk through the wrong way.
“Trust, once broken, doesn’t just leave the room. It leaves a forwarding address to every room you enter after.”
Here is what I have learned about betrayal: it is not the act itself that hollows you out. It is the moment before — the moment you realise that the other person knew exactly what they were doing and chose it anyway. That clarity is brutal in a way that forgiveness hasn’t fully reached yet. Because we all know, somewhere underneath our best justifications, the difference between right and wrong. We were born knowing it. The choice to ignore that knowledge — to look at it clearly and then set it aside like a coat you’re too warm for — that is what stays with me.
Maya Angelou said it better than I ever could: when people show you who they are, believe them. Not the version they perform on good days, not the apology, not the explanation that almost makes sense. The moment of choosing. That moment is the truth. And I am learning — slowly, imperfectly, on this island I did not plan for — to let that truth be enough. To stop running the simulation of how it could have gone differently. To stop being the kind of person who believes that understanding why someone hurt her will somehow retroactively un-hurt her.
It won’t. It doesn’t work that way. I know this now.
The horse runs. Legs shot, breath short, still running — not because the race is beautiful right now, not because the finish line is visible, but because forward is the only direction that doesn’t lead back to the beginning of all of this. And the beginning of all of this is a place I have already survived once.
“I don’t need to survive it again.”
This path — the one that twisted when I thought it would straighten, the one that cost more than I budgeted for, the one I would not trade for a cleaner, simpler route — I don’t regret it. I am not sure I am healed. But I am still here, still running, still learning the difference between a wound and a scar.
And a scar, at least, means the bleeding stopped.