I spent the first days alone, restless and unmoored, waiting for something to settle.
Things were changing, and debts like this always needed repaying. The brutal 12-hour time difference only amplified my feelings of agitation and unease. I shook and shivered from drug withdrawals. For the first three days in Thailand, I saw the outside only in short bursts to chain-smoke my cheap Thai cigarettes and accept food and cannabis deliveries from lost delivery drivers.
I had arrived.
Where exactly that was, was much harder to tell. Stepping outside and looking around offered few clues. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed I was in Bangkok. A palm tree plantation sat behind my temporary residence. The sounds of the infamous Asian Koel interrupted my racing thoughts, and kept them from straying too close to the familiar.
As it turns out, I was over an hour away from anything, or anyone, that mattered.
Even after staying there for eight full days I don’t think I could locate this homestay on a map. If native Thais, delivery drivers included, with address in hand couldn’t find it, I was well and truly lost. Grab drivers were my only real lifeline in this unfamiliar place. Finding each other became a collaborative effort, made harder by torrential rain and strained English. Perhaps this place, like many of my early mistakes in Thailand, was quietly fortuitous. It was exactly the soft landing that I needed.
I never felt like a tourist in Bangkok. Not in the way I expected to. I had decided before I had even disembarked the plane that I was at home. And the first step in making Bangkok my new reality was to leave these particular addictions behind in this strange bed. I thought carefully about how I had arrived there. It wasn’t as if I could look back on my life in the States as a series of successes. Uncomfortable but undeterred, I blanked the slate.
Showing up to a place and knowing it needed to work out, that was new to me.
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