Fire in the belly: about falling in love on top of an active volcano

Is there a better place to experience a turning point than the top of a mountain?

For those with a decided lack of talent for rhetoric, the ones who immediately want to denounce that you may as well experience such turning point on the platform of a train station, or seated down on a toilet: the answer is, of course, no.

When there is no fog, a mountain offers great views, but more importantly, it’s always in motion itself. Kitchen sink philosophers sometimes claim that you can’t cross the same river twice. The same wisdom applies to mountains: you can never climb the same one twice. Tectonic plates rub against one another and push pimples of ash upwards at speeds measured in centimetres per year. Inside it rumbles, fire in the belly. Volcanoes in Indonesia resemble the average tourist in that country: another overdose of sambal and the whole thing must explode. Mine was particularly active. Not my stomach, made of hardened concrete, but my volcano. If he were a child, doctors would definitely label him with ADD. He could never keep his mouth shut for longer than five minutes.

***

According to some sources, Merapi, the mountain of fire, is the most active volcano in the world. I had grown attached to it. Every time I approached Yogyakarta by plane and saw that whopper, I felt a lump in my throat swell to the size of a Brussels sprout. This was my home. It did not feel strange to live within spitting distance of a mountain that contained so much love and destruction within itself. All aspects that tickled a traveller’s imagination slowly integrated into my everyday life. I could barely understand that things could be done differently — that people took showers in other parts of the world instead of pouring small buckets of water over their heads, that trains and buses could leave as scheduled and that maybe, just maybe, you could meet up with someone who arrived on time.

The sounds of Indonesia were the sounds of my life. The bell of the bakso cart, the croaking frogs after a long rain shower, the call to prayer from the nearby mosque, the repetitive tss-tss of sweeping broomsticks, the street musicians jamming away on two-stringed ukuleles and the ever-present sound of the gamelan, whose rhythm went from fast to slow and back again, setting the pace of the country. The smells of Indonesia were the smells of my life: the sweet perfume of clove cigarettes, the terrible stench – so that’s how socks smell after a half marathon through the desert – of durian, the market with its atomic bomb on the senses, the Christmas scent of drying cloves and that of sewer, seemingly emerging from nowhere.

***

Sitting on the top of that mountain, I wondered what a crazy turn my life had taken that I considered all these peculiarities normal. Even more so, that I could no longer imagine another reality. Or were these sulfur fumes responsible for me feeling so merry? The crown of Merapi seemed to come straight from the Lord of the Rings. And not just because my Indonesian fellow climbers looked a bit like hobbits.

“Is that a Silver Queen?”

Among the hobbits sat a blonde elf with a mouth sweeter than saccharin. She eyed my chocolate.

“I love it. Swap for a kretek?”

The deal was sealed. I had toiled for hours on my own to get to the top; we rolled down the dusty flanks of the mountains together. To use a cliché that’s so old that blue lichen grows on it: ‘And the rest is history.’

***

Apparently, I had to turn 28 to experience puppy love. Or as the Indonesians call it, a monkey love. This self-proclaimed lone wolf suddenly didn’t want to spend a second without her. It was as if someone opened a door for me to the next level of life, a secret world whose existence I didn’t know about. I cultivated the image of an independent guy who liked to be alone, who enjoyed watching a sunset on his own during a solo trip, who urged his mates to ‘man the fuck up’ whenever they were grumpy of lovesickness.

All of a sudden, these feelings were gone. All of a sudden, I only wanted to be with her. It was like that day when I, as a toddler, discovered that my parents didn’t eat cornflakes in front of the TV, like the ones in my bowl, but chips: there is no way back. But the most remarkable thing is that, in Indonesia, it seemed perfectly normal to bump into the love of your life on top of the most active volcano in the world. As it was the same as hooking up with your high school sweetheart in the village pub or finding a date on Tinder. My life suddenly ran parallel to a Murakami novel and I didn’t even raise an eyebrow.

For that, Indonesia, I salute you. May Merapi henceforth sow more love than destruction.

***

I wrote this piece in Dutch in 2016 for a writing competition with the theme: turning points in life. I didn’t get selected. Instead, a bunch of sappy and really, really poorly-written crap about beating cancer was. Turns out it was not a writing but rather a sympathy-raising competition.