The Rain Doesn't Wash Everything Away

I was thirteen the first time I realized I was different. It wasn’t a loud realization—not the kind you see in movies, where someone gasps in front of a mirror, shaking hands pressed against their chest. No, mine was quiet. A small, lingering thought, like a splinter under the skin.

It happened in my grandmother’s house in Malang, the air thick with the scent of fried tempeh and damp earth. Rain pounded against the tiled roof, turning the garden into a muddy river. My cousins sat cross-legged on the floor, playing cards, their voices rising and falling in bursts of laughter.

And then, my uncle made a joke.

“Don’t sit like that,” he said, nudging me with his foot. “Only girls sit like that.”

I froze.

I didn’t know why, but something inside me twisted. I looked down at my legs—folded neatly to the side, the way my mother always sat on the floor. My cousins snickered, but I just nodded, shifting uncomfortably, crossing my legs the way boys were supposed to. It was a small thing. But I remember it so clearly, like a scar on my memory.

Maybe that was the first time I started hiding.

Growing up queer in Java means learning to read the air before you even know what that means. You pick up on the way people look at you, the slight hesitation before someone asks why you don’t have a girlfriend, the way your mother sighs when you say you’re “too busy” to bring a girl home.

You learn the game fast.

You laugh when they laugh. You nod when they nod. You hide when they look too close.

It’s not fear—not at first. It’s just easier this way.

But then, one day, you wake up and realize you don’t know where the mask ends and where you begin.

I was sixteen when I saw someone disappear.

Not in a dramatic way. There was no blood, no screaming, no flashing lights. Just a quiet van pulling up in the middle of the night. A man dragged out of his boarding house. No one spoke about it the next day. It was like he had never existed.

“Subversive,” they called him.

I don’t even know if he was queer. Maybe he was just loud. Maybe he asked the wrong questions. Maybe he wore his hair too long, his clothes too soft, his voice too gentle.

But that was the year I learned that in this country, some people simply vanish.

I was nineteen when I met Raka.

He had the kind of smile that felt like a secret, like he knew something the rest of the world didn’t. We met at a wedangan near the university, a small roadside stall with plastic chairs and steaming glasses of ginger tea. He talked about books, about traveling, about how he wanted to see the world. And for the first time in a long time, I felt seen.

But in a place like this, being seen is dangerous.

One night, we were walking down Jalan Ijen, the colonial houses standing like quiet ghosts in the night. The street was empty except for the two of us, our footsteps echoing against the pavement. It was stupid, really. We weren’t even holding hands. Just walking too close, laughing too much.

And then came the sound of a motorbike.

A single slur, thrown into the dark. A bottle smashing on the ground beside us. The roar of an engine disappearing down the road.

I didn’t even realize I was shaking until Raka grabbed my hand.

“Hey,” he said, voice steady. “They’re gone.”

But that wasn’t the point, was it? They were never really gone.

Raka had scars on his back.

The first time I saw them, we were in his tiny rented room, the walls thin enough to hear the neighbor’s TV playing a soap opera. He was lying on his stomach, shirt tossed carelessly on the floor.

“Who did this?” I asked, my fingers hovering over the raised lines.

He exhaled, turning his face away. “My father.”

A beat of silence.

“When?”

“Two years ago.” A dry laugh. “For praying wrong.”

I didn’t ask what he meant. I didn’t need to. In this country, there is one way to be a man, one way to be pious, one way to exist. Step outside the lines, and you become a problem to be fixed.

A sickness to be cured. A mistake to be erased.

And some fathers believe that pain is a cure.

In 2016, the police raided a party in Surabaya, pulling fifty-six men out of an apartment. They called it a "health operation." A cleansing.

Some of them were forced to strip. Some of them were beaten. Some of them never made it home.

When the news came out, my mother read the headline out loud at the dinner table.

“Disgusting,” she muttered, shaking her head. “Ruining our country.”

I said nothing.

That night, I locked my bedroom door and covered my mouth with my hands so she wouldn’t hear me cry.

I was twenty-three when they came for Raka.

It was two in the morning when I got the call. His voice was shaking. “They’re here,” he whispered. “They’re at my door.”

I was already running.

By the time I got there, the street was filled with people. Some were just watching, arms crossed, faces blank. The police were shouting, dragging Raka out of his house. Someone was recording. Someone else was laughing.

“Please—” he started.

A fist to his stomach. He doubled over.

I stepped forward. “Wait, stop—”

A gun cocked. A warning.

And I realized, right then and there, I was nothing.

No power. No voice. Just another face in the crowd.

Raka spent six months in prison.

They called it "moral rehabilitation." They called it "necessary."

When he got out, he wasn’t the same. He didn’t talk about what happened in there. He didn’t have to.

He left two months later. A flight to Thailand, then somewhere else, then somewhere else. The last time we spoke, he was in Berlin, his voice tinny over a bad connection.

“You should leave too,” he said.

I looked out my window, at the familiar rooftops of Malang, the city I grew up in, the city that tried to erase me.

“I can’t,” I said.

He sighed. “Then be careful.”

I spent years thinking that pushing back meant fighting.

That it meant standing up, screaming, demanding the world to see me.

But sometimes, pushing back is quieter.

It’s in the way we exist, despite everything telling us not to. It’s in the way we love, in the way we find each other, in the way we refuse to disappear.

I see it in the small things.

In the way Raka still texts me random poetry at 2 AM. In the way my best friend holds her girlfriend’s hand in the backseat of a Grab car, fingers interlocked like armor. In the way I sit however the hell I want now, my legs tucked to the side, unbothered.

Maybe the rain doesn’t wash everything away. But maybe, just maybe, it makes us stronger.