Today I took myself for a walk. It's been two days straight of working in the apartment with minimal breaks and tons of sweating. I'm even considering just eating salt to make up for the salt crust wave patterns on my black shirts after a day like yesterday, today, tomorrow. Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled to be getting all of this work done, thrilled with the accomplishment of learning new things, applying that knowledge, lessening my internal stress. I'm also a bit stir-crazy after two days of 15+ hours a day at Shaughnessy's computer.
Errand: Buy train tickets from south Thailand to Bangkok on January 6th.
Location: Hua Lampong, the last exit on the MRT (underground).
I arrive at the train station, immediately encounter an english-speaking Thai woman holding an adorable puppy and asking me what I'm doing there. I coo appropriately and we both pat his fat, speckled belly as she laughs at his sleepiness and gestures to a line I'm to stand in. After saying "I'm sorry, what?" at least 15 times, the printout I stuff in my bag looks like it has all of the right stuff on it and it's in english so that lessens my guessing on accuracy.
It's 5pm, I'm about 2600 meters (4km according to Google) from the palace and the next part of my errand - getting information on the free/donation-based meditation classes offered daily at a Wat near the palace. I head out, armed with a map and a vague recollection of a route Aaron and I took through Chinatown (what is between the train station and the Wat) a week or more ago.
Landmarks and the map lead me closer and closer. I'm listening to my Thai language mp3s and working on such phrases as What are you doing? and Wait, or One moment, as I trudge down long city blocks, missing the tight city planning of Portland. The sky darkens and it's night when I'm transversing the city parks filled with joggers, a group of women doing some form of pumped up aerobics, and a very serious group of badminton players.
Just as my first and second toe connection flesh starts to blister, I find the Wat and its door. A monk greets me and I can hear chanting in the recesses beyond. He invites me into an air conditioned space and I pause there, sweat running rivulets down my neck, chest, torso, you name it. I grab some pamphlets, agree to come back tomorrow at 1:30 for the english-speaking training course, and head back out into the hot night to find a river taxi.
It's crowded on the boat. I watch young monks in their golden robes dodging thoughtless falang's who bump into or touch them unintentionally. When a falang couple start trying to see the names of the piers, I show them on my map where we are, proud that I know. By the time I'm four stops away on a very air conditioned BTS, salt crystals have formed complex shapes over my shirt and I'm very aware of how any deodorant in this instance would have to challenge nature itself to remain effective. I'm chest to back with everyone crammed on the train, shoving myself through people to get the three feet to the door when I finally arrive at my station.
Taking my guilty-pleasure motorbike taxi back to the apartment, I shovel down the last 200 calories I can consume on a 600 calorie day, assess my purchases, and engage in a very heated argument about how to get my work laptop when it's supposed to arrive and I have to blame the heat, the frustration of not being able to control anything. I can't even choose when I breathe or what insane thoughts pop into my head, or how to lower my body temperature.
I revisit my journal from one year ago and it's like I can see it all, feel it all, but through a lens of that time - the pelicans dipping low over the Puerto Vallarta bay as the sun stretched it's first light through the hills and buildings piled against the ocean. I read of my own desperate need to make decisions, to connect to people that I hardly know anymore, and it's finally, finally in me to forgive myself. To understand the innocence in my need to connect, to love that lonely, sick person trying so hard to do the right thing, know what the right thing is. I can hold that person I was now and tell her its all going to be okay. Difficult, painful, and finally okay to be alone. That alone isn't really alone, that the world is available and never easy and always beautiful.
I want her to know that she will, one year from that desperate day, walk through the streets of Chinatown in Bangkok Thailand, dodging food vendors and Chinese calendars, past gold dealers, the palace of the king of Siam, walk barefoot through a temple, ride down the Chao Praya on a water taxi crowded with monks and Thai, sweating and stressed and exhilarated, and be. Just be.