Between Thunderstorms, Winter Vacation, Part 1 of 1

The old saying is true. 

When you least expect something to happen, that's when it usually does. Things sneak up on you when you're looking the other way. And that's exactly what happened to me when I walked through departures in Bangkok's international airport and stood, twenty minutes later, facing a boy with big hair.  

And of course, being me, I fell instantly. I watched myself tumble through air. Yeah it was beautiful. It was also temporary and desperate and devastating, but such is the nature of brief romance, right?  They're sort of like midnight summer thunderstorms when it rains and rains and you think it will never stop. It takes down the electricity in your home but you don't care.  You're at the window watching the torrential fall of water, listening for the thunder, shuddering when the lightning cracks a whip through the sky.
So intense is the storm, you kind of want to go out and touch it. Be a part of it, but you know, hope you don't get electrocuted or pancaked by a falling tree. 

But just as it began, the storm has stopped when you wake up the next morning.You put on rain boots and stand outside your house in shorts, searching the streets and spaces around you for damage and wreckage. You assess the time and effort it will take to repair things to the way they were. 

"Shieeet." 

***

After meeting the boy with big hair, I left the next day to spend a week alone in northern Thailand. I had surely not gone to Thailand to fall in love. (...Right?)

So why exactly had I gone to Thailand?  

It's simple.  I went to Thailand to get away. A get-away to just get a way!, y'kno? Not to be a tourist, not to take pictures of beachy sunsets, not to look at temples. In that sense, I guess I could have gone anywhere really.
Lets get into this.

I had gone away to forget an American boy. I had spent half of the year before in a kind of dance with this boy, in a hopelessly distorted sequence of twisting and turning, to a song with a beat way too hard to follow. And in the end, we walked off the dancefloor with insane injuries and embarassments. (No regrets).

But I had also gone to Thailand to get away from the subsequent people that came afterwards. Sometimes you need to pass time with someone when you just can't seem to do it alone. I wanted to change that.

So off I went with the bare minimum of essentials and planning. Just winging it.

When I got there, I wanted to get lost. Up in northern Thailand, I spent two days trekking through beautiful jungle in an effort to reach a hidden village occupied by a small tribe of long-neck Burmese refugees. I sang camp fire songs. I rafted. I played with baby elephants and fed them bananas. I ate squirrel and drank warm water and I was alone. I did meet other solo travelers, one particular man I can  remember, a landscaper with even bigger hair, and a need to cling on to me as you do when you're alone in foreign places. And although we smiled and posed for pictures, I wanted to be lost even when surrounded.

When I was actually there, I just wanted to get drunk. I drank Thai rum and iced tea, mojitos with mulched up mint leaves, Beer Lao on rooftop restaurants, cold Singhas at 8 am on Khao San Road waiting for a friend, buckets of vodka and energy mix oceanside at a full moon party, and Tiger beer while watching ladyboys swing, dance, and twirl. I friggen drank. 

After a week, I just wanted to get high. So I numbed my muscles with agriculture, I raced my heart with chemicals, and I went away inside myself.

I went to Thailand to eat. Oh boy did I eat. Noodles with chicken legs, pad Thai with bean sprouts from street vendors, green coconut milk curry with shrimp and tofu, deep fried chicken legs, oily battered bananas, watermelon slices in a bag, fruit shakes, coffee shakes, and soups.

And then I realized, while sitting alone in a park, that I had gone away to get back to a version of me that is happy. Happy alone.  Of course, by accident, I met the boy with big hair.  I spent the last few days I had in Thailand with him in a blissful whirlwind, chasing highs wherever we could find them. Through our twisting dance and the time between coming and going, I had managed to forget about the American boy and everything else. 

But when I got back to the airport and made my way to arrivals, I saw through the glass doors that there was no snow outside.  Instead of six inches of white frost, there was rain. A cold, unusual, end of February rain.  I looked around. People were in winter jackets and wrapped in scarves.  

Me? Well, I was lugging my purple backpack wearing a hoodie, flats, and shorts. The bus took three hours to get "home". The sky was dark. I had no umbrella. The city was the same as I left it. 

"Shieet."