I fell off of it for a variety of reasons. Reason A is that the posts were taking me ages, because I felt unable to just toss the photos up and just leave them without writing anything about the people or the history of wherever I was. But after lingering for three days in a particularly charmless town called Dalat for the sole purpose of catching up on blogging, I realized that things were getting a little silly. Reason B is that it became difficult to find internet cafes in Vietnam that would allow me to plug in my USB to upload photos. Reason C is that when I finally did plug my USB into a computer it turned out to be the wrong computer. The damn thing got all scrambled, and I was unable to access my photos for ages. It was six weeks before a sweet Cambodian teenager with a Flock of Seagulls hairstyle in an internet cafe in Battambang cleared that up for me. By that time I couldn't even begin to catch up.
But I did write everything down in this now-battered leather bound notebook:
So if I have these
Well, I've been otherwise occupied. Since leaving Asia in August 2012, I worked teaching English to speakers of many other languages in the D.C. area, studied for and took the GREs, applied and was accepted to one of the top schools in the world for graduate studies in English (still not sure how that happened), packed up and moved 300+ miles away to live in new city in a whole other country, and had a semester of graduate school. And things aren't really slowing down. Second semester just started, so I might not be able to really commit to completing this blog for quite some time.
But here's the thing that bugs: those days in Southeast Asia are constantly lingering in my peripheral vision. I'll be reading some particularly dry literary criticism or waiting for the subway or falling asleep, and a scene will flash into my brain as if someone's holding a View-Master in front of my mind's eye. It's usually a place or event that didn't even make it into my leather-bound journal because it was banal at the time: buying fruit around the corner from my apartment, or biking through the alleys of Sakon Nakhon, or riding the bus on the way out of town, heading south for Bangkok through the low Phu Phan mountains. Without effort it all returns with startling clarity, and suddenly I'm looking out the window of a bus climbing the winding road through the national park, glimpsing the miniature houses built as apologies to the forest spirits for the impositions of pavement and traffic, the night falling until all that's left to see are the mountain-bright stars and flashes of the open homes of the odd roadside village. And there's an ache that comes with it, a pull, a tugging towards warm, humid nights and bright flowers and clothes and the helpless laughter that is released by the struggle to communicate without words.
And just the other day, after shouldering the sturdy backpack I bought myself for Christmas, I was trudging through the snow towards the subway and absent-mindedly grabbed for the cheap digital watch that hangs from my right shoulder strap to check the time. And then I remembered that the watch had been looped on the strap of my backpacking bag, not this brand new fashionable one, and that I had given that watch to a Cambodian boy somewhere between Kampot and Kep. He liked the stopwatch feature.
I'm having a new sort of adventure now, and I love it. But I really miss those places and people and interactions, all of it, terribly. And I think that writing about it will make it feel like it isn't 8,000 miles away as the crow flies, and will lead me to remember things that I didn't bother to note in that battered journal. Because every moment of that time is standing by, waiting to be nudged into remembrance by a familiar sensation or unfurled with the tendrils of my mind as it opens to sleep. But maybe not for much longer.
