You cannot hurry, love!

It was a light conversation over lunch. We talked about art, architecture, and the trend of voice notes, which neither of us seemed particularly fond of.

The lady, whom I had always admired for her elegance, told us a story about a friend who had sent her a voice note that left her frustrated. The voice in the recording was slurred, or, in her own words, "I couldn't understand what the fuck she was saying."

I laughed, not because of the message itself, but because it was the first time I had ever heard her use the F-word. To prove that she wasn't exaggerating, she played the recording for us. I laughed even harder. She was right—I couldn't fucking understand it either. How could a person talk like that? I thought.

Then my friend suggested that perhaps she had accidentally pressed the fast-forward button. We both looked at her, confused. It was obvious that we had no idea what she was talking about. She offered to check the message.

"Oh," she said, "you accidentally played the recording at 1.5x speed."

She pressed something and handed the phone back to the lady. Surprised, she played it again, and we all went, "Ahhhhhhh." Then we burst out laughing.

It sounds pretty unimportant—a small glimpse of an ordinary memory. But looking back, the story reminds me of little Semeru Biru, a pair of small ceramic vessels in the form of a boy and a girl, each with a bluish mountain-shaped head.

It took me some time to see the beauty of the glaze covering these two innocent souls. It was like looking at a mountain wrapped in clouds. Mount Semeru was cloudy that day, and I couldn't fast-forward it. I stayed and waited patiently. Slowly, the clouds dissolved, revealing layers of glimmering gold and blue.

Text & Image by Venty Vergianti