Still Online
These days, my life moves between Nha Trang and Jakarta.
One city uploads silence into me.
The other floods me with traffic, neon reflections, unfinished ambition, and noise that never fully sleeps.
Somewhere between the two, I stopped feeling like a person with a permanent address.
I became infrastructure.
An always-online system running quietly in the background of different countries.
People think remote work is freedom.
But after enough airports, temporary apartments, café workstations, and hotel check-ins, your life starts resembling an old FTP server more than a home.
/work
/clients
/drafts
/archive
/unfinished
/dont_open
/final_final_v2_REAL
Some folders are clean and organized.
Others contain emotional debris from years ago that you forgot to delete.
Old photographs.
Expired visas.
Screenshots from conversations that no longer matter.
Ideas written at 3AM during thunderstorms in Jakarta.
Half-working side projects from beach cafés in Vietnam.
Every city leaves files behind.
Nha Trang
Nha Trang stores slower memories.
- Morning coffee near the coast
- Ocean wind entering the room during deployments
- The strange peace of hearing motorbikes fade into the distance after midnight
Jakarta
Jakarta stores heavier ones.
- Rain against skyscraper windows
- Laptop heat in crowded cafés
- Quiet burnout hidden beneath professional Zoom calls
Sometimes I feel like my entire identity is synchronized across devices.
Fragments replicated between locations.
No true main server anymore.
Just mirrors.
Backups.
Temporary sessions.
Even relationships feel networked now.
Some people get read-only access.
Some disappear after timeout.
Some still exist somewhere deep in the archive after years of inactivity.
And me?
I continue maintaining uptime.
Replying to messages.
Pushing commits.
Joining calls from different countries while pretending the system is stable.
But occasionally, late at night, I wonder something strange:
What if remote workers slowly become distributed systems themselves?
Human beings converted into portable environments.
Carrying entire lives through laptops, cloud storage, hotel Wi-Fi, and encrypted passwords.
No permanent geography.
Only active connections.
Maybe that is why certain cities become emotional servers for us.
Nha Trang holds the softer parts of me.
Jakarta holds the restless ones.
And somewhere between those two endpoints, packets of memory continue travelling back and forth across invisible lines.
Still syncing.
Still unresolved.
Still online.
