“Just because you are different, it does not mean you are wrong.”
Bayu
On a year that began with a scroll, a fruit note that leads back to a father, the exact hour the sky over the yard turns violet, and the click in the brain that means yes.
Tap the underlined phrases for notes in the margin. Most of this page can be touched.
Bayu Adi Prasetyo fixes machines in Balikpapan. Before last year he had never worn a fragrance in his life, and did not particularly want to. Then an Instagram review went past on a feed, and the whole thing opened. What follows is the shortest conversion story we have published and, in some ways, the most complete: a man who can still remember not caring, describing exactly how the caring arrived.
No playlist, no genre. He said only that his taste follows his mood, which after reading the rest of this page turns out to be a complete answer.
Four people, one morning
Asked for a background, he did not give a history. He gave a list of weather. Sometimes an absurd person, sometimes a serious person, sometimes a rebellion person, and sometimes just a quiet person. Four selves, all admitted to, none apologised for.
Which matters more than it sounds, because further down the page he tells us how he starts a day: he spends a few minutes choosing a fragrance that suits his mood that day. So the four selves are not a personality quiz. They are the actual input to the actual choice, every morning, before work.
His words, four of them, and what each one tends to reach for at the shelf. Pick the one that got out of bed.
Four moods, and a few minutes in front of the shelf to work out which one you are.
Each one sends you toward a different corner of the collection. That is the part most people never say out loud.
The year it arrived
He is unusually precise about this, because it is recent enough to still be in focus. He had never worn a fragrance. He had never even been curious. Then a review came past on Instagram, he was captivated, and the bottle in the video was Hawas OG. His phrase for it is flat and good: that is the one who started it all.
What happened afterwards is the part worth slowing down for. It began as wanting to smell good, nothing else. It did not stay there.
He did not wear fragrance. Not as a rejection of it, and not as a statement. It simply never came up. Most people live here permanently and never find out they were missing a language.
Bright, fruity, and a weekend that is over
Ask him what a scent takes him back to and he does not describe a place. He describes a temperature of life. Something bright, fruity and playful. Something juicy.
Then he tells you where it goes, plainly, without dressing it up: to being a child, when his father was still alive. When nothing was burdening him or his mother. When every weekend held something fun and nobody had to think about the consequences. Happiness and joy, he says, became one at that time.
It is worth noticing what he has chosen to keep. Not a sad note. Not something dark and elegiac. He goes back through the brightest, most cheerful, most uncomplicated material in perfumery, because that is honestly what it was like. The grief is not in the smell. The grief is in the tense of the sentence.
The same moon · BalikpapanPhotographed by him, this year. It has been up there for all of it.
After the shift
Something we only noticed after laying his photographs out on the table: every single one is taken after the working day has finished. The yard at sundown, with the machines parked. The moon. The warung across the road at eleven at night. This is what a mechanic's own record of a year looks like. Not the work. The hours on either side of it.
The last of the heat coming off the ground and the machines finally quiet. This is the hour his photographs actually start.
19:40 · The yardViolet over the top, one seam of peach along the tree line, and the machines already asleep.
Fruit, and something calm underneath it
What he reaches for now has a shape to it. Floral and fruity together: the sweetness coming off the fruit, the flower underneath making it calm rather than loud. He will wear it at any hour, day or night, as long as he likes it, which is a rule that sounds like no rule and is actually the only one that matters.
The bottle catching him at the moment is Bersemi di Seminyak, from this house, and he is specific about why. The fruitiness and the floral that comes with it.
The order of the morning, and the click
His ritual has a fixed order and he lists it without ceremony. Prayer first. Then water. Then either a book or a digital comic, before work has any claim on him. And only then, a few minutes at the shelf, deciding which of the four people he is going to be today.
It is a morning with almost nothing in it that anyone could sell you, which is presumably why it works.
His definition of good taste sits in the same register. It is not a canon and it is not restraint. It is a physical event: you try something, anything, and there is a click inside your brain that makes you feel, damn, this is the one. Taste, for him, is not knowledge. It is recognition. And you cannot fake the click.
23:15 · Across the roadThe last lit thing on the street, and where the slow living actually happens.
One belief, defended
He would defend one line, and it takes ten words. Coming from someone who describes himself as absurd on some days and rebellious on others, it does not read like a slogan. It reads like something arrived at.
Just because you are different, it does not mean you are wrong.
“I am still learning, even to this day. There is a lot I can learn while living normally.”