Throughout my lifetime, I’ve lived in four or five places. From a small quiet village in West Sumbawa to the big city like Jakarta. There’s one place that I want to claim as my own, though I have no right to it.

Semarang exists in my life like a half-remembered song. I know the melody but can’t quite place the lyrics. I was born there but left when I was barely one year old, carried away to a small town 80 kilometers west where I would spend the next seventeen years of my life. Yet something about Semarang pulls at me, makes me want to call it home in a way my actual hometown never could.

Perhaps it’s the weight the name carries. There’s a certain prestige in saying you’re from Semarang. It’s an okay city, not too big, not too small, not too crowded, definitely not too chaotic. When I mention it, people nod with recognition. They know it. It exists on their mental map of Indonesia in a way my actual hometown never will.

I know fragments of Semarang like scattered puzzle pieces that never quite form a complete picture. I know that my father’s school is the number one school in the city—I even tried to enroll there once but decided against it. I make pilgrimages to Nasi Gandul Pak Memet on Jalan Dr. Cipto every time I have the chance, though the warung is usually closed when I arrive. My family performs our annual ritual of visiting the Gramedia bookstore on Jalan Pandanaran whenever we mudik, as if this routine might somehow anchor us to the place.

I can recite neighborhood names like: Peterongan, Gombel, Banyumanik, Kesatrian, Kalibanteng, Krapyak, Tol Jatingaleh, Tembalang, etc. I know where to find good soto Semarang, or where to get proper lumpia. These are the credentials of familiarity, the evidence I collect to prove my connection.

But then reality intrudes. These names feel strange and utterly distant on my tongue, as if I’m an alien trying to speak a language I’ve only heard in fragments. The words don’t flow naturally. They stick, unfamiliar and awkward. Ask me how to get from Undip to Paragon Mall, and I will freeze immediately. I can’t even picture where Paragon Mall is located, let alone trace a route there in my mind. Without Google Maps, I’m helpless, a tourist in what should be my hometown.

The contradiction is maddening. I visit every year for mudik, walking through streets that should feel like home but instead feel like a recurring dream—familiar in theory, strange in practice. I know Semarang exists in my life, but I don’t live in Semarang’s life.

My connection to the city has always been filtered through distance and longing. My first crush was a girl who studied at SMP 2 Semarang. I saw her picture on my middle school friend’s laptop. The weirdest part is we’d never met, yet something about her being from there made her seem more significant, more real somehow. Even my mother attended a Catholic school there despite not being Catholic herself, adding another layer to my family’s complicated relationship with the city.

To be honest, I prefer Jojga, where I currently live. Jogja feels like home in all the ways Semarang doesn’t. I know its streets, its rhythms, its personality. I can navigate it without Maps, can recommend places with confidence, can speak its neighborhood names with ease. But Jogja isn’t where I’m from, it’s just where I happen to be.

This tension actually comes from a regular question, a simple “where are you from?”.

My instinct is to mention the small town where I actually grew up, where my memories live, where I spent seventeen years of my early life. But there’s always this hesitation, this pull toward another answer: Semarang. The city I want to claim but feel I have no right to.

The question freezes me every time because it forces me to confront this contradiction at my core. I want to be remembered as a person from Semarang, want that connection, that belonging, that simple answer to a simple question. But the unfamiliarity I feel with the city seems to whisper that I cannot claim it.

Identity, it turns out, isn’t just about where you’re born or where you live. It’s about the space between those two points, the longing for connection, the gap between who you were, who you are, and who you want to be. Semarang represents something I’ve never quite been able to grasp: the idea of having a hometown that matters, a place that shaped me before I was even old enough to remember.

Perhaps this unfamiliarity is its own kind of relationship. Perhaps loving a city from a distance, knowing it in fragments, carrying its name like a question mark. Perhaps that’s also a way of belonging. Not the belonging of daily life and worn paths, but the belonging of inheritance and aspiration, of claiming something not because you lived it, but because it lives in you.

The city I want to claim as my own remains familiarly unfamiliar, and maybe that’s exactly what makes it mine.