if love is blind, friendship closes its eyes....

The beach house was the last place in this world I want to be in knowing what she did. I heard the waves crashing to the rocky beach. In the dark I could feel in my eyes the lighthouse moving its head in a rhythm, offering a certain hope that there was someone out there. She fixed my blanket. She checked if I were awake The next morning, on May 14, 1998, we went back to the city.

Was there something wrong, she said, noticing my silence for the last four hours we were working together in the lab. I said yes but only in my brain.

I showed her the newspaper instead. Yesterday, three students from Trisakti Christian University were shot by the military police while they were demonstrating, demanding to ask Soeharto to resign, to lower gas price, and to clean the government from corruption and nepotism. None of which was new to our ears. I heard that we're having a strike too, today. Are you planning on going? I said to her. I am always skeptical in "repairing" our government; it's just unimaginable to me, the amount of work and the result that will follow is not worth it. And if there is a noble thing to do with my life, trying to cut a three hundred year old banyan tree with a knife is just a waste of time. I am not planning to, she said.

The hour was two and no one was in the building except us and one security guard. I continue to edit the reports while you were working on the graphs. This report needs to be done by tomorrow and we both know we're not supposed to be here. The office of environmental conservation is located about a block away from the main boulevard where the main students’ demonstration was happening. I heard a couple of our classmates are there too. Too many bad things happened when we're protesting; there's nothing in my brain saying that it's a good thing to do. No matter how much we said we practice "non-violence", some inconsiderate people would start the fire, throw some rocks to the military police, turning a car, or any object appeared in their eyes to be burned, and will trigger more violence, more kidnapping, from police.

It was 15:00 p.m. when we heard the gunfire. There was no radio, no TV in this building, only local telephone that connect us to the outside world. No body else unless the two of us in this building. This was one of the days that I was grateful to be alive and ask God to give me more time to live. Nothing we could do except stay there and hide. I talked with my roommate on the phone. We heard that students' demonstration is out of control. The Military Police were arresting each of them. One of my classmates injured in the head.

By six o’clock the situation was under control but for some reason the town was shut down by the incident. The electricity line was cut off and a curfew was enforced. She went to the west; I went to the east side of the campus.

I wish I could say goodbye to her and told her I already forgive her for what she had done that night. I may be her friend, but I am not a judge who decides if what she did was wrong or right. The next morning I found out that the police had randomly arrested the students. I’ve never heard anything from her since she went the other way.

I wish I had a drop of courage to just say it.

*On May 14^th, President Soeharto was forced to resigned after the incident that killed at least six students and countless of injured and missing ones in the demonstration to end the corruption, lower the price of gasoline, and economic recovery. The horrendous violence on May 14 and 15 left estimated 500 dead, and there were other deaths as rioting swept through the cities of Surakarta, Yogyakarta, Semarang, Surabaya, Medan, Bandar Lampung, Palembang, and Ujung Pandang. While an uneasy calm seems to have been restored nationwide as of this writing, the likelihood of another round of violent unrest is high as long as fundamental economic and political problems remain unresolved. Around 570 churches were burned, 3,000 Chinese were raped, and I couldn't recall how many people were killed in that day. Satanic, demonic actions, I would say, that drove the mass to do those horrible things.