I didn’t expect the current to take me that far.
It started at Sendang Biru, a beach in Malang, the kind of place that smells like salt and grilled fish, where the waves crash hard but the locals laugh harder. My uncle, Pak Riyadi, always said the ocean was a living thing, and you had to respect it like you respect an old neighbor who knows too many of your secrets. “If you don’t, the water will teach you some humility,” he warned, spitting out the last bit of his clove cigarette into the sand. I was eight when he first told me that, watching the tide pull a plastic bottle back and forth, like it couldn’t decide whether to keep it or throw it away.
That was the first time I heard about arus bawah—the underwater current. Invisible, silent, waiting. “You think you’re floating just fine,” my uncle said, “but before you know it, you’re a kilometer out, waving at your own shadow.”
I didn’t believe him.
Years later, I did.
I was seventeen when the ocean tried to teach me a lesson. It was the end of the school year, the kind of day that felt too big to fit into my chest. My friends and I had come to the beach on borrowed motorcycles, stuffing our pockets with fried tempe and not enough bottled water, laughing at nothing, because at seventeen you still think you’re untouchable.
The tide was lower than usual, the waves rolling out lazy and slow. It felt safe. I remember stepping in, ankle-deep, then waist-deep, then further. The water was warm, humming around my legs like a conversation I wasn’t part of.
And then—
I felt it.
Not a wave. Not a push. Just a pull. A slow, steady grip around my body, not dragging but guiding. I didn’t notice it at first. My feet still scraped against the sand, but softer now. My friends were still near the shore, laughing, but their voices sounded like they were behind glass. I kicked back, expecting to find solid ground, but there was nothing.
Panic is a funny thing. It doesn’t come all at once. It drips in slow. First, it was the cold in my stomach. Then, the way my arms suddenly felt too short. Then, the moment I realized I was breathing too fast.
I tried swimming forward. The shore didn’t get closer.
I tried calling out. The wind swallowed my voice.
Pak Riyadi’s words hit me like a slap: If you fight, you lose. If you fight, you drown.
I stopped kicking.
That’s the trick to escaping a rip current. You don’t fight it. You go with it, let it take you where it wants, and only then do you start moving sideways, following the flow until you’re free.
I let the current pull me.
Fifty meters. Maybe more.
Then, I turned. Not back to shore, not yet—sideways. Stroke, stroke, breathe. My arms burned. The salt stung my eyes. Stroke, stroke, breathe. The panic was still there, but smaller now, something I could fold up and put in my pocket.
Then, my foot hit something solid.
I crawled onto the sand, coughing, shaking, laughing the kind of laugh that comes from relief more than anything else. My friends ran over, shouting something I couldn’t hear. The world was too bright, too sharp. I lay there, letting the sun soak into my bones.
Pak Riyadi was right. The ocean had just taught me humility.
I never forgot.
Even now, years later, standing by the shore with my own nephew, I tell him the same thing my uncle told me: “The current doesn’t care how strong you are. It only cares if you understand.”
He doesn’t believe me.
Not yet.
INSTANT NOODLES 