Either/Or
Genre: Drama
Director: Meirad Tako
Writer: Meirad Tako
Cast: Bryan Domani, Amanda Rawles, Mawar de Jongh
Plot: Part I: The Vigil
In that sterile sanctuary of suffering, where fluorescent lights cast their artificial day across polished floors that had witnessed a thousand heartbreaks, Arya (Bryan Domani) maintained his lonely vigil. The corner lamp wept golden tears of light that pooled in the shadows, each gleam a memory of brighter days now fading like old photographs. His fingers, trembling with exhaustion and grief, remained intertwined with his father’s—those once-strong hands that had lifted him as a child, guided him through life’s storms, now delicate as autumn leaves, cold as forgotten prayers.
The diagnosis had come three months earlier, on a Tuesday morning bright with false promise. Arya remembered how the sunlight had streamed through the doctor’s window, turning dust motes into dancing stars as words like “aggressive” and “metastasized” fell like stones into the quiet pond of their lives. His father had sat straight-backed in the leather chair, nodding with the same dignified attention he’d once given business proposals, as if this too weremerely another negotiation he could master.
Now Mr. Hartono lay beneath the harsh hospital lights, his face a moonscape of hollows and shadows beneath the oxygen mask that whispered its mechanical lullaby. Each breath was a small war, fought in the trenches of failing lungs. The machines around them conducted their electronic orchestra, a symphony of survival played in beeps and whispers. In the corner, a clock ticked away moments like a metronome counting down to an inevitable finale.
“Pa…” Arya’s voice emerged like a moth’s wing against glass. “Do you remember that summer in Bandung? When we flew kites from the hilltop?” His throat tightened around the words, each syllable a small battle against tears. “You said they were like our dreams—the higher they soared, the stronger the string needed to be.”
His father’s fingers twitched in response, a butterfly’s flutter against his palm. In that small movement, Arya felt the weight of a thousand unspoken conversations, of wisdom still waiting to be passed down, of questions he hadn’t known to ask while there was still time.
Through the window, the city lights blurred like stars seen through tears. A night shift nurse moved past the door, her rubber-soled shoes whispering secrets to the linoleum. The ward lived its own life outside their room—physicians making rounds, families huddled in consultation, the eternal dance of healing and hoping playing out in fluorescent-lit corridors.
Part II: The Lighthouse
Hana (Amanda Rawles) arrived as twilight painted the sky in watercolor bruises, bearing not just sustenance but also the weight of seven years of shared dreams. She paused in the doorway, her shadow stretching across the threshold like a bridge between their world and the one outside. The sight of Arya, crumpled in his chair like yesterday’s newspaper, made her heart catch on its own rhythm.
“I brought soup,” she said softly, her voice carrying the warmth of their kitchen back home, where steam still rose from the pot she’d left cooling. “Your mother’s recipe. Remember how she taught me, measuring spices in palmfuls instead of teaspoons?”
The mention of his mother, gone five years now to the same disease that stalked his father, drew Arya’s gaze from the window. His eyes, wells of emptiness that once held stars, found her face like a ship seeking harbor. In them, she saw the reflection of their first date at the planetarium, where they had lain back in plush seats and watched artificial constellations wheel overhead while he whispered the myths behind each one.
“You should eat something,” Hana murmured, crossing the room with careful steps, as if too much noise might shatter the fragile peace. “The night grows longer when you starve your soul as well as your body.” Her hands, offering the container that had long since gone cold, trembled slightly—a detail that would haunt him later in his dreams.
A sigh escaped him like the last breath of autumn surrendering to winter’s embrace. His body, a temple of exhaustion, carried the weight of atlas, yet his mind raced like a hunted thing through dark forests of fear. “I’m sorry, Hana,” each word fell from his lips like stones into still water. “Hunger feels like a distant memory now.”
She set the container aside, next to three others from previous days, each a testament to her devotion, each untouched. Taking the chair beside him, she began to hum softly—an old lullaby his mother used to sing, its melody a thread connecting past to present. Mr. Hartono’s monitors beeped in counterpoint, creating a strange duet of love and machinery.
Part III: The Metamorphosis
Days melted into nights and back again, the hospital room becoming a chrysalis of transformation. The fluorescent lights buzzed their endless mantra, casting shadows that danced like memories on the walls. In the bathroom mirror, Arya caught glimpses of himself becoming a stranger—his father’s son turning into something else, something carved by grief and polished by sleepless nights until he gleamed like obsidian in the dark.
Part IV: The Autumn Leaf
On the night their paths first crossed, rain painted the hospital windows with liquid silver. Arya had ventured to the hospital café, driven by the machine-like insistence of his body for caffeine. The fluorescent lights hummed their tired song over nearly empty tables, where night-shift workers and worried relatives nursed cooling cups of comfort.
Siska (Mawar de Jongh) sat alone in the corner, her hands wrapped around a paper cup as if it were the last warm thing in the world. She wore scrubs, but not like the other nurses—hers were creased in places that spoke of a long vigil rather than a working shift. Her face held the same haunted pallor Arya had begun to recognize in his own reflection.
Their eyes met across the sterile space, and in that moment, something shifted in the universe—subtle as a leaf changing color, profound as the first frost of autumn. She noticed his visitor's badge, he noticed the tears she was trying to hide behind her cup. Neither spoke, but both understood the weight of that silence.
The next night, they found themselves there again. This time, words emerged like hesitant birds taking flight.
"My mother," she said, her voice carrying the weight of untold stories. "Stage four. They say it's a matter of days now." Each word fell between them like petals from a dying flower.
"My father," Arya responded, the words tasting of copper and regret. "The doctors speak in euphemisms now, their hope wrapped in technical terms that mean nothing."
They shared a laugh then—brief, bitter, beautiful in its brokenness. It was the kind of laugh that comes when the heart can no longer contain its sorrow, when pain spills over into something almost like joy.
Part V: The Widening Distance
Hana noticed the change in Arya as summer surrendered to autumn. It wasn't just the new habit of lingering at the café after her evening visits, or the way his phone now lived on silent mode. It was something in his eyes when he looked at her—or rather, when he didn't.
One evening, she brought fresh flowers—chrysanthemums the color of sunshine—to replace the wilting bouquet by Mr. Hartono's bedside. The old flowers had dropped amber petals on the windowsill like tears frozen in time.
"Remember our first apartment?" she asked, arranging the new blooms with careful fingers. "How we grew herbs on the windowsill? You said it was like having a piece of earth up in the sky."
Arya's response came delayed, as if traveling across a great distance. "I remember." But his tone suggested he was seeing a different memory, one she couldn't share.
She caught his reflection in the window glass—saw how his gaze drifted to his phone, waiting for a message she hadn't sent. The space between them, once warm with shared dreams, now stretched cold and vast as interstellar darkness.
Part VI: The Confluence of Hearts
In the hospital garden, where concrete paths wound between carefully tended beds of tropical flowers, Arya and Siska's lives began to intertwine like vines seeking sunlight. They met in stolen moments between vigils, sharing coffee and pieces of their souls.
"Tell me about her," Siska said one evening, as sunset painted the garden in shades of amber and rose. "The girl who brings you soup."
Arya's fingers traced patterns on the bench between them, mapping territories of guilt and longing. "Hana is... she's like the sun. Constant. Life-giving." He paused, the weight of unspoken words heavy on his tongue. "Sometimes so bright it hurts to look directly at her."
Siska nodded, understanding blooming in her eyes like night flowers opening to the moon. "And sometimes," she whispered, "when you're drowning in darkness, even the sun feels like too much to bear."
Their hands found each other's in the gathering dusk, fingers interlacing like poetry finding its rhythm. Above them, the first stars emerged, each one a witness to this gentle betrayal.
Part VII: The Breaking Point
The night everything changed, rain fell in sheets against the hospital windows, nature's own symphony of grief. Mr. Hartono's condition had taken a sudden turn, his breathing becoming a ragged battle against inevitability. The machines around him sang their desperate chorus as doctors and nurses moved with practiced urgency.
Arya stood pressed against the wall, watching his father's life navigate its final rapids. His phone buzzed in his pocket—Hana, surely, responding to his terse message about the emergency. But it was Siska's name that glowed on the screen, her words a lifeline in the storm: "I'm here if you need me."
Time stretched like taffy, sweet with memory and bitter with anticipation. Through it all, his father fought with the same quiet dignity that had defined his life. When the end came, it was with a gentleness that belied the violence of loss—like a book closing on its final page, like a song fading into silence.
In the aftermath, as dawn painted the sky in shades of pearl and promise, Arya found himself in the garden again. Hana found him there, her love reaching out like sunlight through storm clouds. But he had already turned toward shadow, toward the comfort of shared darkness he'd found with Siska.
Part VIII: The Unraveling
The weeks following his father’s funeral unspooled like a thread pulled from a treasured sweater—each day making the whole thing feel closer to falling apart. Arya moved through his life like a ghost haunting his own existence, his apartment becoming a museum of memories he couldn’t bear to face. Hana’s toothbrush still stood in its holder, her favorite mug waited patiently in the cupboard, each object a silent accusation.
In the evenings, he found himself drawn to the hospital like a moth to flame, though there was no longer any reason to be there. Except Siska. She had taken to walking the grounds after her mother’s treatments, her own grief creating a gravitational pull he couldn’t resist.
“Do you believe in parallel universes?” she asked one night, as they sat beneath a banyan tree whose roots seemed to reach into the underworld itself. “Somewhere there might be versions of us who never knew this kind of pain.”
Arya watched the play of shadows across her face, thinking how grief had its own kind of beauty. “Sometimes I think we’re living in the wrong universe,” he replied, his voice soft as falling leaves. “Like we took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in the darkest timeline.”
Hana called that night, her voice carrying across the digital divide like a lighthouse beam searching for lost ships. “Come home,” she said, not knowing he was already home—just not to the home she meant. “We can face this together. Grief doesn’t have to be a solitary journey.”
But solitude had become his armor, and Siska his mirror in the darkness. They understood each other in ways that hurt less than Hana’s relentless hope, her determined love that demanded he heal, that he return to the person he used to be.
Part IX: The Storm Breaks
On a Tuesday evening, heavy with the promise of rain, Hana arrived unannounced at his door. She wore the blue dress from their first date, carried a bag of groceries like an offering of normalcy. Her smile, when he opened the door, was bright enough to burn.
“I thought we could cook together,” she said, moving past him into the kitchen they had once shared like a dance floor. “Like we used to, remember? Your father’s Soto recipe.”
The mention of his father cracked something in Arya’s chest. “I can’t,” he said, the words tasting of ashes. “Hana, I just… I can’t.”
She set the bag down with deliberate care, each movement measured as if handling explosives. “Can’t cook? Can’t remember? Can’t love me anymore?” Her voice held no accusation, only a terrible gentleness that made everything worse.
“I’m seeing someone,” he said to the floor, to the walls, to anywhere but her face. “Her name is Siska. She understands—”
“Understands what?” Hana’s question cut through the air like a blade through silk. “What it’s like to lose someone? I lost them too, Arya. Your parents were my family too.”
Rain began to fall outside, nature’s percussion accompanying their final act. Hana’s tears matched its rhythm, each drop a period at the end of their story.
Part X: The Bridge
The night air hung heavy with moisture as Arya stood on the Sutomo Bridge, its iron railings cold beneath his palms. Below, the river moved like liquid darkness, its surface occasionally catching the reflection of passing cars, brief constellations in the deep.
His phone lay silent in his pocket, heavy with unanswered messages. Hana’s last words echoed in his mind: “Love isn’t just about understanding pain. It’s about choosing to face it together.” Siska’s text glowed with a different truth: “Some souls are meant to drown together.”
The city lights blurred into a corona of color, each one a star falling into the river of his consciousness. He thought of his father’s last breath, how it had seemed to carry away the last tether holding him to the world of the living. He thought of his mother’s garden, now overgrown with memories no one tended.
“Forgive me,” he whispered to the night, his words carried away by a wind that smelled of rain and remembering. “Forgive me for being too small a vessel to contain so much love, too fragile a soul to bear so much pain.”
The moon watched with her ancient, understanding eye as he stood between earth and air, feeling the weight of gravity like love’s final embrace. Each heartbeat was a countdown, each breath a farewell to a different possibility.
His last thought was of paper boats, sailing in puddles after rain—his father’s hands guiding his own in careful folds, his mother’s laugh like music, Hana’s smile bright as morning, Siska’s eyes dark as still water. The river reached up to embrace him like a lover, like a mother, like forgiveness itself.
Part XI: The Echo
They found him at dawn, when the river surrendered its secrets to the morning light. The news spread through the city like ripples in still water, touching lives he’d never known he’d touched.
Hana and Siska met for the first time in the hospital corridor where their paths had never crossed during those long nights of vigil. They recognized each other instantly, the way two people sharing the same wound might.
“He talked about you,” Siska said, her voice small in the vast emptiness Arya had left behind. “About your light.”
“He wrote about you,” Hana replied, holding out a creased paper found in his apartment. “About finding darkness to match his own.”
They stood together at his funeral, their shadows stretching toward each other across his grave like hands that could never quite touch. The priest spoke of peace and finding rest, but both women knew the truth—that some stories don’t end, they simply change form.
Epilogue: The Continuing
The world spins on, as worlds must. Seasons change, leaves fall, rivers flow. In the years that follow, Hana plants a garden of night-blooming flowers, their fragrance carrying memories into the darkness. Siska leaves the hospital to work with grief counseling groups, helping others navigate the labyrinths she knows too well.
They meet sometimes, these two women who loved different pieces of the same broken soul. They share coffee in the hospital café where it all began, speaking of him in the way people speak of dreams upon waking—with a mixture of longing and relief, knowing that some stories are meant to be carried rather than resolved.
For in the great economy of the heart, nothing is ever truly lost; it merely changes form, like water becoming cloud becoming rain becoming river, flowing forever toward the sea of memory where all stories eventually merge. And sometimes, on nights when the moon is full and the wind carries the scent of jasmine, those who loved him swear they can hear his laughter in the river’s song—a reminder that love, like water, finds its own level, its own way, its own peace in the end.
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