I Thought Bali Was a Place
For years, I told people Bali was my safe place. I credited the island: the wet green of Ubud after rain, the incense curling from small offerings on the pavement, the roads narrow enough that every car seemed to pass by faith. I thought I returned because the land softened me. It was only after Kadek died that I understood how easily we mistake a person’s care for the character of a place.
In my early twenties, I moved through the world with an ease I would later lose. I bought tickets without needing to justify them. I wandered because wandering was reason enough. Somewhere between then and adulthood, responsibility began to colonize my sense of wonder. There was work to do, money to make, a mother to worry about, and an increasingly persuasive narrative that told me a good daughter should remain wherever her duty was.
Even during the years when I traveled constantly for business, movement no longer felt like freedom. Airports became extensions of the office. I answered messages while boarding, landed already late for something, and learned to calculate whether a place had been worthwhile by what I could bring back from it. But between work trips, whenever I could, I would slip away to Bali.
Every time I landed, Kadek was waiting beyond the airport doors with a sign that read baby sis Umi.
Not simply Umi. Never just the name. He gave me a relationship to arrive inside of.
Sometimes the luggage I brought was only luggage. Sometimes I stepped through those doors carrying a life I could no longer explain. Either way, he would take the handle from my hand. There were entire trips when I went to Bali alone and did very little except spend time with him. We drove, ate, walked, and sat beside each other without needing to turn every hour into an experience worth photographing. Once, I met his baby cousin, a small warm body being passed between familiar arms, and felt something unexpectedly close to home.
People are often suspicious of tenderness between a man and a woman. They search for romance because friendship, particularly the kind that asks for nothing and protects without possessing, is apparently more difficult to believe. But Kadek belonged to a category I had quietly searched for throughout my life. I had always longed for older-brotherhood, for a man who could make me feel safe without making me feel indebted to that safety.
Kadek called me his little sister, and I believed him.
There was a language barrier between us, but it never became a limit. If anything, it spared us the illusion that understanding requires perfect language. He could tell when I was hurting before I had decided whether I would admit it. On those days, he would walk beside me without asking me to convert pain into a story he could follow. There was no interrogation, no attempt to solve me, no well-intentioned demand that I make my sadness legible.
He did not make my pain perform.
Once, he insisted on taking me to a water purification ritual. I was tired and mildly grumpy, and I asked whether I really needed to go. Kadek was rarely insistent about anything, so when he looked at me and said there was something I was carrying and that he thought it would help, I listened. Not because I understood the ritual, and not because I was certain water could release whatever had lodged itself inside me, but because he had noticed the weight before I had found language for it. If it mattered to him, I decided it would matter to me.
The water was colder and heavier than I expected. It fell over my head and shoulders with enough force to scatter thought, and for a while there was nothing but the body trying to remain upright beneath it. I was told to scream. Not delicately, not in the contained way a woman learns to express pain so that it remains comfortable for everyone nearby, but completely. The water was loud enough to take the sound from me, so I gave it everything I had.
Then I was told to laugh.
I remember resisting that instruction more than the first. A scream can be summoned from pain, but how does one produce laughter honestly simply because someone asks? Yet when you are drenched in the middle of nowhere, your hair against your face, your clothes heavy with water, having just been given permission to release a sound you had spent years swallowing, laughter arrives more easily than dignity expects. It began awkwardly and then became real. Perhaps the body understands before the mind does that relief and joy are not opposites, that sometimes one follows the other because there is finally enough room.
That was one of the last places Kadek took me.
When someone dies suddenly, the world changes its grammar before the heart can learn the new tense. There is no gradual withdrawal, no final disagreement, no slow diminishing of intimacy that prepares you to place the relationship in the past. A person is present, woven into the ordinary assumptions of your future, and then everyone begins speaking of them as though the conversion has already been completed.
But there was no relational ending.
Kadek did not become less important before he died. We did not grow apart. I did not stop expecting another airport sign, another drive through Ubud, another walk in which I would not have to explain why I was quiet. Death ended his life, but it did not instruct the bond to end with it. Some part of the relationship simply continued, still reaching forward toward plans the world had already cancelled.
I had money set aside for him. I had things I meant to give him and questions I assumed I would have time to ask. There were two red bracelets, one for each of us. I put his in his bag and later hung mine from the dream catcher he had given me, as though small objects could complete gestures that life had interrupted.
Grief has a talent for converting lateness into disloyalty. It convinces you that if you had loved correctly, you would have arrived sooner, known more, done the ritual at the right time, handed over the money while there were still living hands to receive it. I began to confuse not saying goodbye properly with not loving him enough.
Perhaps that is what guilt offers us after sudden death: the fantasy that there was still something we could have controlled. Regret is painful, but it is sometimes easier to carry than helplessness. If I can blame myself for missing a window, then at least the window existed. At least the story briefly returns to a world in which my actions might have changed the ending.
Most days, I am not actively sad. I work. I draft. I answer messages and buy groceries and move through ordinary life with the competence expected of someone the world has continued to require things from. Then I open a drawer looking for something else and find the bracelet. I see a dream catcher. I think deliberately of his face. The grief rises so quickly it feels less like remembering than being remembered by the loss itself.
Every time I consciously think of Kadek, I cry.
Not because I have spent all these years suspended in the day he died, but because grief does not obey the proportion of time. It can remain silent for months and still know exactly where the body keeps it. It sleeps inside objects. It waits beneath music. It hides in the muscle memory of landing somewhere and expecting a familiar person to be waiting beyond the doors.
For a long time, I avoided Bali. I told myself I was not ready to return to a place that held so much of him, but I think I was also afraid of learning that the island had been neutral all along. The roads would still curve through the same green. The offerings would still be placed outside in the morning. Visitors would still arrive calling the place healing, sacred, transformative. Bali would continue being Bali without any awareness that the person who made it safe for me was gone.
I had believed the geography held me. In truth, Kadek did.
He had dreams for Bali that were larger than himself. He spoke about them without spectacle, as though wanting better for other people were an ordinary responsibility rather than something requiring applause. I used to think honoring him would mean completing every unfinished gesture exactly as I had intended, returning on the correct day, giving in the correct way, locating some act large enough to answer the permanence of his absence.
I know now that grief rarely gives us that kind of symmetry. There is no gesture proportionate to a person. No ritual can make a goodbye retroactive. No amount of devotion performed afterward can revise the fact that I believed, as people often do, that there would be more time.