Meeting

I am in Bangkok.  I would like to make that a metaphor for something.  I am lost.

Half a world and I would like to be lost.  But I am tethered.  I am not lost.  My career is with me.  My  paunch.  My desire to shed so much and walk off into this vast Asian city much the same way Jim Thompson disappeared in Malaysia in the Cameron Highlands in 1967.  I want to be lost.  And to bring it all with me, too.

How did all those troops get to Vietnam?  It must have been by boat, but holy cow, really?

Deplane.

They have some kind of unscented, smell removing candles burning in various places in this hotel.  There is a smell.

Deplane again.

Where am I?  Is there a linear narrative in this?

She sat across from me marveling in the same way I was.  My former sister in-law, tethered still by mutual appreciation and her need to be an aunt.  Therefore justification to stay connected.  My need to have connections to my past.

She was in casual, loose, black clothing, good for the tropics.  I am dressed in preppy mid scale - khaki pleated pants and a collared white dress shirt, open at the neck and sleeves rolled.  I want to be casual tropic in cargo shorts and pocket-tee.  I want to be 23, lean and eager for life and not 46, paunchy and here to work - therefore uneager.

Still, I was bemused by how two people who have not been face-to-face in over two years while living in the US can find days, times, travel plans and happenstance putting them together in Bangkok.  Provided a crow could fly this far, how far is that?  We were curious about the tricks of space and time to achieve such things.

I kept thinking we had engineered another meeting in an odd place some time in our twenties, but I couldn't place the time or circumstances.  I shall have to ask her by email, now that she is gone to Indonesia.

Email facilitated, surely.
"It is amazing we did this with our phones out of commission!" Neither of our phones was working in Bangkok despite our international GSM communication chips.  We had to rely on wifi hotspots and email to coordinate, sporadically.
"How could anything like this happen before email?"
"We'd leave messages at the hotel, or youth hostel, and plan far enough ahead.  Sometimes we even wrote letters and post cards.  It happened.  We lived then."
"It seems so strange now - 'meet me at noon by the news stand in Harvard Square'"
"Or the fountain across from the Louvre."

When flying in a few days ago from South Korea we passed over the South China Sea and Vietnam.  I thought of an old National Geographic photo of US jets on the Tarmac at DaNang, shirtless beach volleyball in the off hours in olive drab, rip stop, tropical BDUs.  Mortar rounds from infiltrators.  Black pajamas.

Daphne was wearing something very like black pajamas except now we would say it is a Yoga outfit.  I was sweating a steady stream in my business casual.