Mai Pan Rai

After you left I stayed home, ate white rice, moved bed to hammock to bed. Drank and drew pictures of our banana tree.

After two weeks, Pi-Joy knocked on the door. I hadn’t paid the rent, so he came over with six quarts of beer and his wife went into the kitchen and made spicy shark fin and tom yum and som tam while me and Pi-Joy got drunk on the porch. He didn’t ask about the rent, and he only asked about you once. “She’s gone,” I said, and he said “Mai pan rai.” Don’t worry about it. “Hot soup, cold beer.”

I cheated on you and didn’t pay the rent and Pi-Joy bought me beer and his wife made us dinner and we sat there watching the geckoes on the walls and listening to the monkeys in the trees and the little stream burbling and he told me mai pan rai. He was so nice to me, and I deserved it so little. I wished I’d been born Thai and understood mai pan rai. But all I had left of you was the worry that you might not have enough music or enough to read, that you might be living alone in some dirty apartment in Spain without anyone to make sure you ate. That you were missing our little wooden house and Pi-Joy and the weeping of the monkeys and the peace that grew out of the night.