I live alone, far away from my family. I work at the university, close to my house. I have many colleagues, I have a lot of students, but I don’t have any friends. I have no friends to chat during lunch, no one to go out with for dinner. I practically have no friends.
It has been 9 months since I am back to Indonesia, and life has been completely different. My life is very simple. I go to work at 06.00. Because my house is very close to the university, I will arrive at my office at 06.05. My daily schedule is very flexible. Sometimes I have a very busy day that I don’t have time for lunch and sometimes I have a leisure day that I can listen to music during lunch. I will go home at 19.00 and arrive at home at 19.15, depending on the traffic. I will have dinner by myself while reading and after that I will go to sleep. It is the same routine for almost 9 months.
For years ago, I went abroad to do my PhD. I lived alone, far away from my family. I studied at the university, close to my house. I don’t have any colleagues, I don’t have any students but I had a lot of friends. I enjoyed chatting with my friends during lunch and I have many friends to go out with for dinner. I had a lot of friends.
For years of my PhD was very colourful.  I worked very hard, during weekdays and weekends. I went to the university at 07.00. Because my house is very close to the university, I will arrive at my office at 07.05. My daily schedule was quite flexible. Sometimes I had long hours of experiments in the lab, sometimes I had to work with programming all day long in front of the computer. Nevertheless, I always had time for lunch with my friends. I enjoyed walking to the canteen while drinking hot chocolate, discussing all sort of things that happened in life.  During lunch my friends and I exchanged not only food but also ideas and most important I had friends to share my feeling. I normally went home at 20.00 but sometimes I went home earlier to have dinner with my friends.
Back then I had friends not only for lunch and dinner, I had different friends for playing chess, badminton, table tennis and squash. I had also friends to watch a stand-up comedy once a month. I had friends ready for backpacked and explored the world during holidays. I had friends whom I can share my passion in writing lyrics and stories. I had friends for learning Quran and Islam. Every week I even had friends while broadcasting for online radio during the weekend. Far away from family, I did not felt lonely because I had many friends whom I can share my joy and pain.Â
For the past 9 months, I never had a lunch with anyone except during meetings. I enjoyed meetings partly because I can see different faces that I do not see on a daily basis, partly is also because we talked about life during the lunch. I felt more connected to my colleagues, some of them who were actually my friends back then. But now, everything seems so different….to be continued
