Pimpi

Sometimes I catch myself wanting to give birth.

Not to a child, not to a flesh-and-blood human that cries and breathes, but to something that refuses to rot. An immortal piece of art. A creation so permanent that it outlives the quiet decay of ordinary days. Or maybe, if I am being brutally honest with my own hubris, I just want to play god for a second. We laugh about it, of course. We laugh because admitting that kind of hunger out loud sounds slightly unhinged.

Let us pretend we have a better life, a life where the noise has finally settled and the floor is steady beneath our feet, just so we can reach this kind of question.

Imagine you have arrived. You have everything you ever fought for, everything you ever stayed awake dreaming about. The titles, the recognition, the security, the open horizon. What are you going to do with your life now?
What else is left?

“I want love,” she said.

She paused, looking out past the railing, and smiled. “A family. That is enough.”

I nodded. And strangely, her answer was enough for me to feel enough too.

It sounds simple, almost anticlimactic after all the grand rhetoric about legacy. But isn’t that just comfortability? Isn’t that quiet, unremarkable warmth the very thing that makes humans human in the first place?

Then she asked me, hard enough to make me feel the heavy on my breathe, “If we pretend once more that we are safe enough to ask the hardest question, who are you without all of it?”.

Who are you without your achievements? Without your job, without your titles, without the badges you spent years pinning to your chest? What makes you human when the resume is burned away?

I looked down at my hands.

“I am who I love,” I said. “The love that I have.”

She smiled, nodding slowly. “That is enough.”

And it was. It felt solid, like an anchor dropping into calm water. Just enough to feel complete without having to conquer anything. Then she looked at the absurd piece of furniture beneath us and burst out laughing.

“Isn’t it weird that you named this giveaway, lonely couch ‘Pimpi’?”

She stubbed out her finished cigarette, turned around, and walked back inside from the balcony, leaving the smoke to dissipate into the night.

I sat there for a moment in the quiet.

Pimpi is just mimpi, the Indonesian word for dream. It is a discarded, second-hand couch sitting outside on a small balcony, taking the wind and the rain. It has no grand pedigree and no aspirations for immortality. Yet here we were, two people leaning into its worn cushions, untangling the universe between drags of smoke, figuring out that the dream was never about becoming a god at all.

It was only ever about learning how to be here, loving what we can, and letting that be enough.

And maybe this is it. Maybe I did give birth to something after all. Not a monument, not a theorem etched in stone, not some grand proof of my existence. Just a song. Written on a balcony, on a couch named after a mispronounced dream, while my flatmate walked away laughing.