One Year Apart, Same Street, Same Story

 

I don't know how to start this without sounding like I'm performing grief. So I won't perform anything. I'll just tell you what I know, and what I feel, and what keeps me up at night even when I'm too exhausted to be angry anymore.

Affan Kurniawan was 21 years old.

He was a Gojek driver. He was somebody's son. He was somebody's backbone — the kind of person who stopped going to school so the family could eat, who picked up every order, every route, every shift, because that's what you do when the world doesn't hand you options. On the night of August 28, 2025, he was just delivering food. He wasn't there to protest. He wasn't there to fight anyone. He was just doing his job in a city that was on fire, trying to navigate a street that had turned into a warzone without anyone asking his permission.

A Brimob tactical vehicle — the Rimueng, 4.8 tons of armor and steel — ran him over. And then, according to witnesses, it stopped. And then it kept going. He died at 19.58 WIB. His last order was still pending.

Bambang Setiawan was 59 years old.

He sold mirrors, not metaphors, actual mirrors. The kind you hang on your wall to check yourself before you walk out the door. He and his wife Sudarsi had a stall, and they usually closed at 6 PM, but that evening she saw the crowds gathering and told him to pack up early. He didn't make it home.

He died on August 28, 2026. Exactly one year after Affan. Same area, Pejompongan, Central Jakarta.

I don't know what to do with that kind of coincidence. I don't think the universe is trying to be poetic. I think the universe is just showing us, again and again, that this is what happens when a system decides that ordinary people are acceptable losses.

Here's the thing about grief that nobody tells you: it doesn't always come out as tears. Sometimes it comes out as this low, constant hum of rage that you carry around in your chest like a second heartbeat. You go about your day. You eat. You scroll. You laugh at something stupid. And then you remember — a kid was delivering food and got crushed by a government vehicle. A man was trying to close his stall and never came home.

And the hum gets louder.

I've been exhausted. God, I've been so exhausted. Not just physically — the kind of exhausted that lives in your bones, that makes you question whether any of this matters, whether staying loud does anything, whether the people in those buildings with their marble floors and their allowances and their air-conditioned silence will ever actually feel the weight of what they've done and what they continue to allow.

But then I think about Affan.

I think about how he got up that morning and put on his jacket and picked up his helmet and opened the app and started driving. He wasn't thinking about legacy. He wasn't thinking about being remembered. He was thinking about the next order, the next kilometer, the next meal for the people he loved.

And somehow, he became unforgettable anyway.

This is what they don't understand about ordinary people. They think silence is safety. They think exhaustion is surrender. They think if they make the noise loud enough and the scandals frequent enough and the corruption normalized enough, we'll all eventually look away, go numb, focus on surviving our own lives.

And sometimes — I'll be honest — it works. There are days I wake up, and the weight of it all is so heavy I can't do anything except breathe and exist and try not to fall apart. Cognitive warfare, someone called it. Learned helplessness. Cognitive fatigue. Gaslighting on a national scale.

They want you tired. They want you numb. They want you to forget Affan Kurniawan. They want you to forget Bambang Setiawan. They want you to move on because moving on is easier than accountability. I refuse.

I'm not writing this because I think a blog post will change anything on its own. I'm not naive. I know the people who need to read this won't read it, and if they do, they won't feel it, and if they feel it, they won't act on it.

I'm writing this because Affan deserved more than a trending hashtag that faded in a week. I'm writing this because Bambang's wife, Sudarsi, went back to the area looking for him, didn't find him, went home, woke up, and read a WhatsApp message that wasn't from her husband. I'm writing this because these two men — a 21-year-old and a 59-year-old, a driver and a mirror seller, on the same street, one year apart — are the real face of what's happening in this country.

Not the politicians. Not the press conferences. Not the promises written in documents that may or may not be worth the paper they're printed on. These two men.

We held a protest a few days ago. Thousands of people showed up at the DPR building and demanded the Asset Forfeiture Bill be passed, demanded the death penalty for corruptors, demanded accountability. An agreement was made. December 15 is the deadline. DPR leadership said they'll resign if they miss it. We've heard things before.

But here's what's different now: we remember. And remembering, it turns out, is an act of resistance. Every time you say their names — Affan Kurniawan, Bambang Setiawan — you are refusing to let the machine win. Every time you stay loud when you're exhausted, every time you share, every time you show up even halfway, you are doing something that power structures hate. You are refusing to forget.

I'm tired. I said it. I'm tired in a way that sleep doesn't fix. But I'm not folding. Not because I'm strong — I'm not always strong. But because I keep thinking about a 21-year-old on a motorbike just trying to deliver somebody's dinner.

He didn't get to be tired.

So I'll carry it for him. And for Pak Bambang. And for every person in NTT and Kalimantan and Papua and all the places this government has failed and abandoned and set on fire — literally and figuratively.

Rest easy, Affan.

Rest easy, Pak Bambang.

We remember you both. 

We're not going anywhere.