Ten Firsts

1. The first time my sister and I became friends. I was in high school and had gotten really drunk for the first time at her best friend's house. There was an assortment of fruity and colourful liquor bottles stashed in the bedroom closet. I remember an acid green liquid and the taste of sour apple across my tongue. My sister and her friend (both sober) drilled me with questions about this new boy I had gotten my panties in a knot over. She drove me home; I fell over on the porch trying to get in the house. She brought me in as tenderly as only an older sister can and sat me down on the ledge of our bathtub. Wobbly and sleepy, I remember her carefully cleaning out my newly pierced eyebrow ring with tea tree soap and a cotton swab so it wouldn't get infected. We've been friends ever since.

2. The first time I fell in love at first sight.  It was on a beach in Southeast Asia in a coastal city I had just arrived in.  I was wearing a lot of clothes for the beach, too much clothing for tropical weather for that matter. My mom had made me wear a really lame fanny pack too.  I didn't have a purse because I don't believe in them (I'm a pockets kind of girl) so I lugged a tacky plastic grocery bag around filled with beach essentials like sun lotion, a book, water bottle, camera, and cigs.  My "love-at-first-sight" in question was an older dude: tall, dark, handsome, and wait-for-it, European! He was beyond charming with shaggy hair and an "I'm going to break your heart" smile on a body that was almost two meters high. He was wearing a collared dress shirt at the beach. So pretentious. He was perfect. And in my really lame fanny pack, I was still dashing. My 22-year-old self couldn't dream up a more fairy tale love affair.

3. The first time I rode on a motorcycle.  Okay, I wasn't driving it, I was joyriding on the back with earphones in.  I probably had my super douche-looking shades on too.  I was in the most rural place you'll ever imagine with bony children whose diet consisted of pig fat and boiled cabbage three times a day.  This is near the town of Vinh, a little south of Hanoi, in Vietnam. I was on my way to see my maternal grandpa for the first time.  He was in a hospital bed waiting for the curtain to fall.  The decrepit hospital was far away and I rode with my uncle on brown dirt roads.  I had never seen so much sky before. So much blue and shades of green.  I was filled with the adrenaline and invincibility that fast speeds, bumpy roads, and wind in your hair fills you with. (And my grandpa lived through his illness and remains my last living grandparent).

4. The first time I saw my dad cry.  I was up really late watching Anywhere But Here on the TV.  The phone had rang, a funny sounding ring that happens only when people overseas call. It was past midnight so my parents woke up alarmed, already predicting disaster.  They were right. My dad's mom, an old woman who visited Canada only once when I was a kid, had died.  I couldn't remember her. I had no connection to her except through my dad. The only image I have to this day is of a tall and really skinny lady with a really big forehead.  The female version of my dad actually. My dad was in the bedroom with my mom for the call. I was the only child awake in the living room. When the call finished, I heard him hurriedly shuffle out of his bedroom, down through the hall, and past the living room to get to the front door. In his near run past me he said in a cracking voice, "grandmas gone". Outside, in the night's dark and quiet, I heard the most haunting wail I've ever heard from any creature in this world. It was just one scream, but filled with all his breath, scraped from the bottom of his lung, and must have tightened all the muscles in his body.   A noise that carried with it all the pain that losing a mom leaves you with. 

5. The first time I learned how to imitate sleep.  I used to live in a tiny town really close to the most heavily armed border in the world.  Being addicted to the city life, I needed a fix every Friday night.  It took three hours in total to get from my crummy shithole house to the world's second largest metropolitan.  Sometimes I would make these trips to town twice a week.  The first portion consisted of a ninety minute bus ride, the rest of the time was split between taxis, subways, traffic, and waiting around.  I found a way to work with my brain and body in order to shut myself down in a sleeplike manner, not completely submerged in the unconscious but pretty damn close.  I would board a bus, close my eyes, and moments later, wake up closer to where I needed to be.

6. The first time I discovered life and mortality.  I was beyond young, maybe three or four. Perhaps five or six.  I was in the first house we ever lived in in Peterborough, Ontario.  My childhood memories of biking and picking crab apples and watching scary movies at night on the living room floor with my brothers and sisters were at the later house, the townhouse across from the church. But this moment was earlier, at the house I shouldn't have remembered.  I was sleeping during the daytime. It could have been a weekend, I remember a big ruckus about something, an impending party my parents were planning perhaps. I had woken up scared shitless. I had dreamed that my parents had died. In that instant, I understood that life didn't last forever.  I have no memory before this one incident.  I guess life starts when you know it ends. Before bed for the next few years, I prayed to a god I thought I believed in to "never let my parents die."

7. The first time I realized I will never be pretty enough.  This happened my first year living abroad.  I was teaching English in Korea, a country way too small with way too many people.  I have never been surrounded by so many people in my entire life.  It was the worst culture shock possible.  In elementary school in Toronto, I was taught to look in a mirror everyday and say "I'm beautiful."  It's what is inside that counts.  But in the society I was transported to, you are told verbally and frequently just how much beauty equates to success.  I'd see women with bandaged eyes, hundreds of plastic surgeons offerings beauty at the cut of a knife, makeup being applied on subways and cafe shops.  The vanity here is poisonous and everything I thought I learned back in Canada went away. I'll never be as pretty as these girls.  It's obsession is almost an addiction.  They say, poor people who become rich aren't generous, but greedy assholes. I think its because when you have something powerful, you just want more and more. Same with beauty. You may be somewhat attractive, but then you want to be the prettiest girl in the world.  That’s the shame I feel for this country and what it has done to me.

8. The first time I enjoyed a steak.  It was medium rare at a Brazilian steakhouse in Seoul. My boyfriend at the time decided to rent a hostel for the weekend and the two of us sauntered around town trying to paint it up in all colours of the rainbow.  He was in a suit. I was in heels. We drank martinis and margaritas and I devoured different cuts of meat.  I remember eating a skewered piece of tenderloin wrapped in a fatty strip of bacon and moaning noises I never heard my body make. The site of oozing blood on my plate used to make me queasy, now my mouth waters and I actually get turned on, unable to distinguish the differences in pleasure.

9. The first time I heard Rebecca Black's hit song Friday. It was on a Monday. This was actually two nights ago. I had just taken my dog out for a walk around the neighbourhood and came home to an empty evening planned. I normally would have entered into a Skype chat with this insanely hot dude I met on vacation, but I had deleted him from my Skype after a fight and was all sad and whatnot. So I ransacked my Facebook newsfeed and noticed all these Rebecca Black links, comments, and references.   Totally bored and wanting to be a part of current pop culture, I YouTube'd her.  I laughed really hard. I replayed it. I sang along even.  Then I Wikipedia'd her, Google'd her, and watched the Jimmy Fallon remake.

10. The first time I fainted in a Subway restaurant. It was on a Sunday I think, the cold cut combo was on special.  I was in my first year of university.  If we can borrow the metaphor from How I Met Your Mother, the first and only thing I did that day was "eat a sandwich."  But not the traditional kind.  There was no bun involved, it was served in a way where the meat tasted, um, fresher with stronger flavours.  I must have "eaten" too much, I was feeling really "full", but still I thought it was a good idea to take a walk through the park with a buddy.  Of course, we got hungry. We saw a Subway. As I was trying to order, I started feeling really light headed, and then BLACKOUT.  I remember lying in my friend's arms when I came to, he must have caught me as I fell backwards.  He said my eyes completely rolled behind my head before I dropped like a stiff plank of wood.  I remember seeing the Subway guy peer at me from behind the counter. When I got to my feet I was extremely embarrassed and woozy.  "Ugh...sorry," I said.
"It's okay. I have that affect on people."

Past

"Do you think that the past, because it has already occurred, is finished and unchangeable? Oh, no, it is clothed in mutable taffeta, and whenever we look back at it we see it in another color."

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."