Rasta Baby

At the Rasta Baby, when Pi-Nung asked us if we needed a place to stay and offered us the hammocks in the bar and you thanked her in Thai you’d learned on the plane. It was the look on your face when you concentrated on getting the tones right—scrunched up, and little lines between your eyebrows. That was where it hit me. Watching you holding pink and purple bills, counting baht, learning to speak.

But part of it came from being with you watching a sunset over an ocean I never thought I’d see. Part was Nung’s generosity; part was the sandy path and the tall stilts and the pavilion in the treetops where the jungle met the beach. Part was that day’s monsoon, and just thinking about the word monsoon. Part of it was that the week before we had walked behind a hired guide through a rice paddy, stopped to take off our shoes and carried on muddy-footed through the fields to the village to be welcomed by a family of eight people—an old, a middle-aged and a young couple and two children—with a pot of sticky rice and another of river weeds, and that we sat on reed mats on the floor, the grandparents came to eat and drink rice wine and the men killed and boiled a chicken and we ended up staying up long after dark at the low candlelit table taking shots and making jokes with our hands. Love came from the air and the Thai smiles, it was in the food and the tobacco color of your skin, getting darker every day.

I was more in love with the world than with you, but it was so hard to tell where we ended and everything else began. It might have helped, to have realized that at the time. Your smile, my happiness, elephants marching in the trees on a family trip—it all mixed in me, and what came out came unchecked, because it had to, the pressure inside from a joy bigger than I could contain maybe shouldn’t have come out as I love you, but it did, and it felt right so much of the time that I didn’t notice until I’d already fucked up.