I OPENED MY EYES AND CLOSED IT AGAIN, really compelled to stay on the bed for the next few hours. But sensing the awfully cold morning air on my face, I cringed and felt betrayed. Looks like I forgot to close the window last night. I woke up slowly, and stop. It took me about 5 minutes to kill the nauseating sleepy haze that lurch in my head. Feeling better, I stepped out the bed lazily, walked across the room and opened the door.

It was 5.30 in the morning. There was a spark of dim light on the skyline but most of it still painted with a dark color. I can feel the morning dew stinging on my face and the awful rattling breath sending shivers down my spine. Bad breath, bad breath. Shouldn’t not forgot to brush the teeth last night. Wait, triple negative at this early morning? Sigh, nevermind.

My eyes scanning and searching for a pair of old running shoes. Ah, there it is, hiding shyly behind the door. I bought it six or seven years ago, I’m not sure, but it’s definitely has already worn out. There are countless blotchs & stains from everywhere on, make it look both tough and creepy that one of my friend mocked it as an arsenic relic. I closed the door, locked it, took the shoes, put it into my bycycle, then started to ride. It was a time for my morning ritual: seeing her.

She is a kilometer away. As I pedalling onward, the wind howling, but the world stopped and the city stand still. All I can hear is white noise and the rest of the silence. Then my mind dancing. Her. I had to be mental to be so drawn on her. No matter how much I tried, I really can’t remembered, not even once, how and when did I started to notice her.

The route is the same every morning. Past the warung that hasn’t opened yet, its plastic chairs still stacked like a child’s tower. Past the mosque where the loudspeaker hums faintly — not yet the call to prayer, just the electrical murmur of a machine waiting. Past the row of houses where someone is always burning trash at this hour, the thin blue smoke mixing with fog until you can’t tell which is which.

There’s a particular stretch of road — maybe two hundred meters — where the canopy overhead is thick enough to block the emerging light. For those few seconds, you’re riding through a tunnel of green-black nothing, and the temperature drops just enough that you notice it on your forearms. Then the road opens up again and there she is. Waiting.

When I was middle schooler in Papua, I saw a lot kind of her. Everytime we can came home early from school, me and my classmates would cross 2 mountains with a ridiculous name — Gunung Empat Ratus and Gunung Aduh Mama —, then find our sanctuary in the middle of her. We called it “Batu Tengah”, a majestic crystal clear river that runs in the heart of our little town. In the middle of this river you can see a huge rock that strangely popped up (hence the name is Batu Tengah) and serves as a resting spot while we were swimming arround.

I think about Batu Tengah more than I should. The water was so clear you could count the stones at the bottom — grey, brown, some flecked with what we were convinced was gold but was probably just mica. We’d jump from the rock and the cold would seize your chest for one perfect second before your body remembered how to breathe. The current carried the sound of our shouting downstream, toward the older kids who fished with lines made from sewing thread and bent safety pins.

The jungle around the river was dense in a way that cities never reproduce. Not decorated. Not landscaped. Just thick. Layers of canopy so complete that rain would reach you thirty seconds after it started — first the sound on the leaves above, then the drops filtering through, each one warm from its slow descent. The air smelled like wet bark and something faintly sweet, maybe rotting fruit somewhere, maybe flowers. You couldn’t always tell the difference.

We didn’t know the names of most trees. Didn’t need to. They were just there, in the way that the sky is there — a fact so constant it doesn’t require language. The old men in the village could name them, of course. Could tell you which bark cured headaches, which leaves you could wrap fish in for cooking, which roots would make you violently sick. Knowledge accumulated over centuries, encoded not in books but in daily practice.

That knowledge is disappearing now. Not dramatically, not in a single catastrophic moment, but the way all quiet things disappear — through inattention. Through the slow replacement of one thing with another thing that seems, at the time, more useful.

The numbers are staggering when you look at them directly. Indonesia has lost over 26 million hectares of forest since 1990 — an area larger than the United Kingdom. Between 2001 and 2020, the rate of primary forest loss in Sumatra and Kalimantan averaged roughly 500,000 hectares per year. Papua, which held the country’s last great expanse of intact forest, began losing ground rapidly after 2011, just around the time I was writing these words for the first time.

The causes are documented exhaustively. Palm oil plantations. Pulp and paper concessions. Mining operations. Transmigration programs that moved families from Java to the outer islands and gave them forest to clear. Each cause has its own literature, its own advocates, its own counter-arguments. I’ve read enough of them to feel the particular fatigue that comes from understanding a problem completely while being unable to solve it.

But statistics flatten experience. When you read that 26 million hectares have been lost, the number is too large to feel. It becomes abstract. What isn’t abstract is this: the forest behind my school in Papua — the one we walked through to reach Batu Tengah — is smaller now. Not gone, but smaller. The edges have been trimmed back, the way you’d trim a hedge, except the hedge is an ecosystem that took thousands of years to build and will take thousands more to rebuild, if anyone bothers.

The river is still there, I’m told. The rock is still there. But the banks are muddier now, and after heavy rain the water runs brown instead of clear. Sedimentation from upstream clearing. The old men who knew which bark cured headaches are mostly dead, and their grandchildren work in Jayapura or Jakarta, sending money home to families who now buy paracetamol from the pharmacy in town.

She is similar to what I see back then in Papua. Only much uglier. But — and here’s lies the problem — there’s not much her left for an easy access. People kept chopping her into pieces and replace it with a new shinny thing. Something that I’m sure happen in every single modern city in Indonesia. Not there’s something wrong with being modern though, because it’s the thing that link me to the wider world. But I just hope that more city can find a way to keep at least a small remnant of her arround. Not in the outer circle of city, not in the mountain far away, but in the heart of place where you can passed it by on your daily life.

That’s the thing people don’t understand about urban green space. It’s not about aesthetics. It’s not about property values, though realtors will tell you it helps. It’s about daily proximity to something that doesn’t need you. Something that was here before you arrived and will be here — if you let it — after you leave. Something that operates on a timescale so different from yours that standing near it recalibrates your sense of what matters.

Every city in Indonesia is having the same argument right now, whether they know it or not. The argument between expansion and preservation. Between the concrete mixer and the root system. Between the quarterly development report and the century-old tree that nobody included in the cost-benefit analysis because it doesn’t generate revenue.

Jakarta solved this argument by paving over nearly everything and then wondering why the floods get worse each year. Surabaya built malls where there used to be parks and then spent millions on flood mitigation infrastructure. Yogyakarta — my Yogyakarta — still has pockets. Small ones. Getting smaller.

I ride past them every morning and try to notice. That’s the least I can do. Notice.

There is a writer — I think it was Robert Macfarlane, though it might have been someone quoting him — who said that the loss of nature is not just an ecological crisis but a crisis of language. When the trees go, the words for trees go with them. When the rivers change, the stories about the rivers become fiction. When the forest shrinks, the vocabulary of a people shrinks with it, until there are no words left to describe what was lost because the words themselves have been lost.

In Papua, the Dani people had dozens of words for different types of sweet potato. The Asmat had specific terms for the sounds a forest makes at different times of day. Languages that encoded ecological knowledge as precisely as any scientific taxonomy. Languages that are now classified as “endangered” by UNESCO, which is a polite way of saying: almost gone.

I am not Dani or Asmat. My connection to Papua is biographical, not ancestral. But I stood in those forests as a child, and the absence of them — even the partial absence, even the thinning — registers somewhere in my body that language doesn’t fully reach. A phantom limb. The sensation of reaching for something that used to be there.

As I’m busy with my mind, I realized that I were already in my place. I stopped and look up. There she is: the small forest. She must be a hundred years old, standing there all alone and look content while the morning ray lit up her face. I wave hello, and she grins back.

She doesn’t need my greeting. She doesn’t need my morning visits or my sentimentality or my guilt about what’s happening to her relatives across the archipelago. She just stands there, doing what she has always done — converting sunlight into sugar, pulling water from the earth, dropping leaves that will become soil that will feed her roots that will pull more water that will drop more leaves.

A closed loop. Perfect and indifferent.

I stand with my bicycle and watch the light move through her canopy. Somewhere behind me, the city is waking up. Engines starting. Metal gates rolling open. The smell of frying oil from the first warung of the day. The world of human industry, pressing forward.

She doesn’t notice. She grins.

I tell myself I’ll come back tomorrow. I always do. One day, I know, I’ll come back and find her gone — replaced by a parking lot or a mini-mart or a cell tower. And I’ll stand there on the pavement where she used to be, and I’ll feel the phantom limb again, and I’ll mourn.

But not today. Today she’s still here. And so am I. And the morning light is doing that thing it does where every leaf becomes a small green lamp, and the air smells like wet earth, and for a few minutes the city is quiet enough that you can hear her breathe.

That’s enough. For now, that’s enough.