Run!

Crap jobs, broke all the time, no insurance, student debts, friends in the war—none of my problems were really my problem.

A simple solution: buy tickets on your credit card and go to Thailand with someone you met in a bar and life becomes new. Walking out of the front door is an experience. Work is an adventure. Ordering at McDonald’s is exotic. It seems too easy because it is.

A rhythm enters you. Day, night, day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Everyone speaks in ups and downs, men hold hands and every meal is eaten with a spoon, but people are people. They have eyes and noses. They drive cars and tell jokes.

In time, sounds become words, words become things. Please, thank you, pineapple, what is this? Durian. Okay, I’ll try it. So you eat a fruit that smells like shit, eat a few cockroaches and drink beer and start to forget.

At night we took off each others’ clothes, learned smells and tastes and the stupid faces we make when we’re coming. In the mornings we drank tea. In the afternoons, pineapple lassies or beer or both, or we took a bus and a ferry to some other paradise. We talked about the people we’d been. The pressures that gave us this shape or that, pressures that were slowly slipping from mind, and eventually we stopped talking about “back home” and let the afternoons remain smooth as the sea.

Water clear as moonlight, the sun intense as a staring eye. Conversation that came and went like the tide—fluid, massive movements of varying depth. We did a lot of crossword puzzles. We skinnydipped at night, strung with phosphorescence.

Were we really crazy? My parents thought so. My friends. But I felt more alive, more connected, more real. As a child I had flashes of I exist, but it had been years since I’d felt that explosion of oddness: I am I and I am here. Out of context I still filled my lungs. I occupied space, felt human. And you were there, and you were like me, and we were like them. It felt like the first time someone else takes off your clothes, and you take off theirs. You have parts. I do too. Look at what we are.