Sometimes it’s not merely the land that changes, but the memory it holds. Heat rises off asphalt in faint blue flickers—like ghosts. You stand still, breathing, as the road beneath you breathes too, expanding slightly in the swelling heat. There’s a weight beneath your shoes that isn’t just concrete. The faint hum of an erased river, or the shape of a home now swallowed by a mall. The past hasn’t quite disappeared. It has simply been paved over.

I sell motorcycles in Malang, East Java. A strange job, maybe, to start a climate story with. But hear me out—my work puts me right where the road is growing. I’ve watched rice fields vanish under slab after slab of tar, watched kampungs sliced up by highways that promise ‘modern mobility’ but leave no sidewalks for the people they displaced. I’m not an activist or academic. I’m just someone who wakes up, ties his laces, and steps into heat so thick it feels like the city itself is simmering with frustration.

Every morning, the sun hits the roads like it’s trying to prove a point. The blacktop outside my house warms fast, hotter than it used to. There’s less shade now. Trees were taken down to ‘clear the view,’ but what view? Billboards? Wires? My son plays with a plastic tricycle on that road sometimes. I don’t let him stay long.

Asphalt’s secret? It’s not just pavement—it’s a black tongue licking up the world. Not wet, no, but it soaks in footsteps, protests, tire marks, blood sometimes, laughter too. It absorbs everything we leave behind. Not just structurally—though that’s part of it—but socially. You start to wonder if these surfaces remember more than we think.

What if the hot concrete in our neighborhoods doesn’t just reflect sunlight, but echoes the injustices it’s been built over? Maybe I’m stretching. Maybe I’m just tired. But when I walk through a former kampung now turned parking lot, it doesn’t feel neutral. It feels like the land is trying to scream through the heat.

Heat islands, yeah, that’s a term used a lot in articles. But here, it’s not an ‘island.’ It’s a cage. When the power goes out in the afternoon, my neighbor lies down on a tile floor and just sweats. No air movement. No escape. You can’t fight heat like that. You endure it. And the weirdest part? It doesn’t feel like it belongs to nature anymore. It feels man-made, like the city is punishing you.

Urban expansion here isn’t some distant, abstract policy—it’s brutal, intimate. I’ve stood in alleyways where people still hang laundry across half-broken roads, because that’s what’s left. I’ve talked to a mechanic whose workshop was split by a new access road. His tools rusted after the roof was cut to fit a pole. ‘Development,’ they said.

The irony is, motorcycles are part of that very system. I sell the machines that people use to escape traffic, heat, and isolation. But in doing so, I help feed the sprawl. Sometimes I ask myself if I’m just adding fuel to a fire we can’t see anymore. It’s a weird guilt. Not so dramatic. The slow, itchy kind that settles in your bones.

In conversations with people here, I started mapping stories—not with GPS, but with emotion. Where did someone used to play? Where did a wedding happen before a gas station took its place? I wasn’t just learning geography. I was learning grief. And that kind of cartography—the one we don’t teach—is vanishing fast.

There’s anger under the asphalt. I know that sounds poetic, but I mean it. Zoning laws here feel more like war strategies than urban planning. They erase art, music, murals—then call it progress. A painted wall gets bulldozed for a ‘clean aesthetic.’ An old tree is cut for a drainpipe that never even drains. And nobody’s really asked us how we feel. We just adapt.

That’s why I started writing this. Not to rant. Not to mourn, either. But to notice. To notice how people move differently when the road under them was built over what they loved. To notice how asphalt might not forget. Maybe it doesn’t have a brain. But it has a body. And that body carries heat, weight, time.

I recently read an article about an emerging science called thermal memory. It allows computers to store memory in fluctuations of heat; to retrieve and recall those memories later on. What if our cities worked like that too—what if asphalt, with all its heat, held memories we could one day read?

I don’t really have a solution. I’m not here to propose anything neat or clever. I just want you to feel what it’s like to sell a bike in a back alley built over forest roots you can’t see anymore. To know that the road you’re on isn’t just infrastructure—it’s memory under pressure. It remembers, even if we don’t.

Maybe the roads don’t speak, but they echo—in heat, in cracks, in the absence of shade where trees once stood. Selling motorcycles in alleys paved over now-forgotten fields has taught me that progress is rarely silent—it hums, it burns, it forgets. And maybe that’s why I keep listening. Because somewhere beneath this asphalt skin, the city remembers. Not merely in language, but in temperature. In restlessness. In the stories no one asks to hear. If we’re to build anything better, we must first kneel—not to worship, but to feel what still flickers beneath the dust.