Gilded

A story of Berlian

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The package had been sitting on my kitchen counter for three days.

I kept walking past it the way you walk past something you're not quite ready for — the way I used to walk past the flight simulator at pilot school before I felt ready to embarrass myself in it. I'd bought the bikini impulsively, late at a night when I was scrolling through my phone after a long Surabaya-to-Jakarta turnaround, half-delirious with post-flight exhaustion and the particular reckless confidence that sets in when you've just landed a 737 full of people in gusty crosswind conditions. I can do anything, I'd thought, and then I had clicked purchase on a golden bikini from an online boutique that I had absolutely no practical reason to own.

Now it was Tuesday. I had two days off. The Jakarta humidity was pressing against my apartment windows like a living thing, and I had run out of excuses.

I cut the tape with my thumbnail, pulled the tissue paper aside.

It was more gold than I had expected.

Not subtle. Not hinting at gold — actually gold, the color of late-afternoon light bouncing off the Citarum on a clear day, the color of the trim on my grandmother's old Quran. I held it up and the fabric caught the light from my window and threw little amber reflections across the ceiling, across the aviation memorabilia on my shelves, across the framed photograph of my first solo flight that my instructor had printed for me and that I've moved to every apartment I've lived in since 2022.

I stood there for a moment, holding it.

Then I took it to the bedroom.

---

My wardrobe mirror is full-length, slightly tilted because the stand was always a little uneven and I never got around to fixing it. The effect is that I always see myself at a very slight angle, like a photograph taken from just below eye level. I used to find this annoying. Now I've decided it's my best angle, which is the kind of conclusion you reach when you stop having energy to be self-critical about every little thing.

I had cleared the afternoon intentionally. No calls scheduled, no mentoring sessions, no drafts to review for the company newsletter's next green aviation column. My herb garden on the balcony had been watered. The apartment was quiet except for the distant drone of a departing aircraft — probably a batik Air narrow-body on the Denpasar route, based on the engine tone, though I admit that's the kind of thought that reveals just how thoroughly aviation has colonized my inner life.

I changed.

The bikini fit well. Better than well. The fabric was structured enough to feel secure, and when I turned to face the mirror properly, I went still for a moment.

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Here is what I saw:

A dhole.

That part first, always — because that is the first thing other people see too, and I learned early that the most useful thing I could do with that fact was to simply accept it, look at it clearly, and decide what I wanted to do with it.

I am a dhole in a country where dholes are not especially common, in a city where most of my neighbors are herbivores, in an industry where a significant portion of my colleagues are male and the rest are predominantly larger, more conventionally imposing species. I have dark, warm fur that runs auburn along my flanks and deeper toward my back, a muzzle that is distinctly and unapologetically carnivore, ears that I used to think were too large for my face before I decided they were one of my better features. I am 175 centimeters of aeronautics degree, 2,000 flight hours, and more early-morning runs around Kalideres than I can count.

In the gold bikini, I looked like myself, only turned up by about twenty percent.

That is the only way I know how to describe it.

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I grew up understanding, from a very young age, that I was going to be noticed.

Not because I sought it — though I've come to seek it now, in my own way — but simply because I existed visibly in spaces where my existence stood out. The village near Cimahi where I grew up was full of good people, but we were the only predator-carnivore family, and even good people notice. Teachers noticed. Shopkeepers noticed. The boys at school who were eventually my friends had to first move through a period of deciding whether they were afraid of me, and most of them worked it out eventually, and I don't hold the ones who needed longer against them because they were just children processing what they'd been told by adults.

You can spend your life resenting that visibility, trying to minimize yourself so that people are less unsettled. I watched my father manage it through generosity — by being the farmer who fed the village, by being so irreproachably decent and hardworking that his species became secondary information, filed behind everything else people knew about him. And I respect that strategy. I am my father's daughter in many ways.

But I made a different choice, somewhere along the way.

I cannot tell you exactly when it happened. It might have been the day my instructor put me in the left seat for the first time and I understood — at a cellular level, not just intellectually — that I was going to be a pilot. It might have been the first time I landed a passenger aircraft and walked through the cabin and saw the passengers look up and briefly process the fact that their pilot was a female dhole from West Java, and then watched most of them rearrange their faces into something like surprised approval. It might have been one of the hundreds of small moments in between — a seminar, a photograph going up on my Instagram, a high school student in Cimahi looking at me with that particular expression that means I didn't know this was possible.

But at some point, I stopped flinching at being seen.

I started leaning into it.

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The thing about a gold bikini is that it does not ask for permission. It is not apologizing to the room. It is not waiting to see whether the room is comfortable before it commits to existing.

I am aware that sounds like a lot of philosophy to hang on a piece of swimwear. But I have spent a considerable amount of time in my life thinking about what it means to take up space, and my conclusions tend to arrive wrapped in unexpected packaging.

I turned sideways in the mirror.

My posture in the air is excellent — it has to be, because a co-pilot who slouches reads as uncertain, and uncertain is not the energy you want in a cockpit. That posture has become muscle memory now, something I carry with me even off duty. Standing in front of my wardrobe in a gold bikini, I was still standing the way I stand in a flight deck: shoulders settled, chin level, weight balanced.

I looked, I thought, like someone who had arrived.

Not arrived in the sense of having finished — I have a captain's license to earn, a master's degree to complete, a scholarship foundation that currently exists only as a note in my phone but that I intend to make real. Not arrived in the sense of having nothing left to prove. But arrived in the sense of: I am here. I am standing in this particular body, in this particular life, in this particular apartment in Kalideres with runway sounds coming through the window, and I am not apologizing for any of it.

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I have a confession, which is that I almost didn't buy it because I thought the gold was too much.

Too flashy, I thought. Too attention-seeking.

And then I heard myself thinking it, and I had a quiet internal argument with myself that lasted about thirty seconds and ended with me clicking purchase.

Because here is the thing I know about myself, which I did not always know: I have never, in my actual life, been penalized for being too visible. I have been stared at on the MRT. I have been the subject of double-takes at boarding gates. I have had passengers ask to speak with the captain, and then I have introduced myself as the co-pilot, and I have watched them recalculate. I have been visible my entire life in ways that had nothing to do with what I was wearing.

And I am still here.

What I have actually been penalized for — what has cost me real energy, real confidence — is the times I tried to be smaller. The times I second-guessed whether I should speak up in a briefing. The times I modified my Instagram captions to be slightly less direct because I worried about coming across as arrogant. The times I almost didn't submit my thesis on fuel efficiency for the faculty award because I thought someone would think it was presumptuous.

Every single time I made myself smaller, I lost something.

Every time I took up my full space — every time I introduced myself as First Officer Berlian without any qualifying softness in my voice, every time I published a photograph I was proud of, every time I stood at the front of a high school auditorium and told a room full of teenage girls that the cockpit was a place they belonged — something was gained. Not always immediately, not always visibly. But cumulatively, irreversibly.

I have decided that this is data.

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The gold catches the light differently when I move. I found this out by lifting my arms slightly, stretching the way I stretch after a flight, rolling my neck. The fabric shifts and the shimmer shifts with it — not static, not a single fixed impression, but something that moves as I move.

I have a beach trip coming up in three weeks. There is a group of us going — a few pilots, a couple of the flight attendants I'm friendly with, one of the ground operations managers who plays volleyball badly but with enormous enthusiasm. We're heading to Pangandaran, which I haven't been to since I was nineteen and went on a university field trip that was ostensibly about coastal geology but was mostly about discovering that some of my classmates were very good company.

I will wear this at Pangandaran.

People will look. They look at me anyway, always, for reasons that begin with species and continue through female and conclude with that specific expression that says I'm trying to work out what you're about. The gold bikini will simply add one more data point for them to process. And I have long since made my peace with being a data point that takes people a moment to resolve.

In fact — and this is the part that took me the longest to admit — I have come to enjoy it.

Not in a vain way, or not only in a vain way. What I enjoy is the moment after the look. The moment where people rearrange their assumptions. The moment where I exist in three dimensions instead of whatever flat prior they came in with. There is something that happens in that moment that feels, to me, like a small and real kind of progress. Like a very minor clearing of fog.

I have a friend — another pilot, a female Visayan warty pig who flies out of Cebu for a different carrier and who I met through a regional women-in-aviation network — who tells me I'm too optimistic about this. "Half of them just file you under 'exotic' and move on," she told me once, over video call, both of us still in uniform from our respective days.

"I know," I said.

"That doesn't bother you?"

I thought about it. "It used to," I said. "Now it mostly just makes me want to make sure the other half really see me properly. To make the ones who actually look worth their while."

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "That is either very healthy or very exhausting, and I can't tell which."

Honestly, I think it's both.

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I am thirty one years old in September.

I have 2,000 flight hours and I want 20,000. I have an Instagram following that surprises me every time I think about it. I have a brother in Ciguguk who can fix any motorcycle engine ever manufactured, and a brother who taught me to love mathematics, and twin brothers who are going to do something extraordinary with computers, and parents who sold belongings so their daughter could learn to fly. I have a herb garden that currently contains turmeric, kencur, pandan, and one very determined basil plant that is technically a Mediterranean herb and has no business thriving in the Jakarta humidity but continues to do so out of sheer determination.

I have a golden bikini, and I am standing in front of my wardrobe mirror trying it on, and my first thought was too much, and my second thought was no. exactly right.

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There's a particular sensation I get on final approach when everything is aligned — the glideslope centered, the localizer nailed, the speed exactly where it should be, the runway lights ahead expanding steadily into something that looks like a welcome. It's not excitement, exactly. It's more settled than that. It's the feeling of being precisely where you are supposed to be, doing precisely what you are supposed to be doing, with all the preparation behind you making itself known in the quality of the moment.

I got a smaller version of that feeling in the mirror.

Oh, I thought. There you are.

There is a version of me that spent a lot of years looking in mirrors the way I used to look at the flight simulator — sideways, uncertain, braced for embarrassment. A version that calculated the distance between what she saw and some imagined acceptable version and found the math discouraging. That version was working very hard and not being very kind to herself, and she had reasons, because the world gave her reasons.

But she also became the version standing in this mirror now.

I spent years being the only carnivore in a classroom, and I learned to hold my head up. I spent years being the only female in a flight training cohort, and I learned to speak clearly in briefings. I spent years being the youngest person at industry tables, the most unexpected person in airline magazines, the name people had to read twice before they placed it. Every time the world offered me an invitation to make myself smaller and more comfortable for everyone else, I declined — sometimes gracefully, sometimes gracelessly, always ultimately.

The woman in the gold bikini is the result of all of that declining.

She is thirty, or almost. She is a dhole from a village near Cimahi who learned to read weather maps and calculate fuel loads and talk anxious passengers down from turbulence panic with a steady voice through a PA system. She runs before dawn and photographs Indonesian landscapes from above and grows herbs on a Kalideres balcony and mentors cadets and worries about her parents and sends money home and has been thinking seriously about whether the Chery Tiggo PHEV or something else entirely will be her first car, the way a person only thinks about things when they are finally stable enough for those thoughts to feel real.

She is not small.

She has never actually been small. It just took some time for the inside and outside to match up.

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I turned away from the mirror, finally, and went out to the balcony.

The aircraft noise was louder out here — a constant low-grade hymn that I find more soothing than intrusive, the auditory equivalent of being near the sea. The late afternoon light was the color it gets in Jakarta around four or five, that thick gold-orange that makes even the ordinary look like a painting, makes even the apartment blocks across the road look like something a photographer would frame deliberately.

I thought about Pangandaran. The beach. The volleyball player who is bad at volleyball. The clear water I'd last seen when I was nineteen and had no idea what my life was going to become.

I thought about wading into that water in this bikini — this loud, unapologetic, entirely too gold bikini — and I thought about the looks, and I thought about the moment after the looks, and I thought: good. Let them look. Let them see me properly. Let them update whatever they assumed before they got here.

I thought about my father, who earned his good standing in a village through years of patient goodness, through rice and reliability and the quiet dignity of a man who was always going to be noticed first and known second and who chose to make the knowing worth the trouble.

You showed me how to do this, Bapak, I thought. I just do it loudly. I hope that's okay.

The turmeric on my balcony needed a little water. I went to get it, still in the bikini, because my apartment is mine and I can do whatever I like in it, and this is a small freedom that I am aware is significant: to be in a space that is entirely your own and move through it entirely as yourself.

I watered the turmeric.

I watered the kencur.

I stood for a moment by the very determined basil plant and looked at it with a feeling that I recognized, after a moment, as kinship.

Good for you, I thought. Neither of us should be here. Here we are anyway.

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Later, I folded the bikini carefully and set it on the shelf where I keep things I'm saving for something — a good occasion, a right moment, an afternoon that deserves a particular version of showing up. Pangandaran in three weeks. Or the pool at the complex in Cimahi when I visit my parents next month. Or somewhere I haven't thought of yet, some beach or poolside where the light is right and the water is warm and I decide that today is exactly the kind of day for gold.

I took one more look at my wardrobe mirror on my way out — that slightly tilted angle, that not-quite-straight view of myself.

Smiled.

Too much, I had thought.

No. Not too much.

Exactly right.

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Two trends in one

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Story and character: Berlian the Indonesian dhole by  A dhole and a Caitian

Art by:  tony07734123/kangwolf