Tarrying is a lyrical meditation on romantic paralysis, unfolding within the metaphor of a waiting room. Infused with the profound influences of migration experiences and the exhilarating, yet overwhelming, intoxication of youthful freedom, it maps a self drifting in time, place, and longing, caught between lovesick delirium and the slow bloom of post-romantic lucidity.

This prose-poetry is an essential part of a larger, ongoing project about Chinese-Indonesian women who left the country in the aftermath of the May 1998 riots. Neither forced nor voluntary migrants, their quiet departure remains complex yet often overlooked. Through shifting temporalities and lyrical fragments, the piece unfolds in three interconnected movements where the body, or material reality, meditates in the spaces between the tangible and the spectral, becoming both monument and omission. Home, with little possibility of permanent return, reemerges in unexpected ways, and reconciliation becomes an impossible bargain with memory.