Gia

It has been five days since I knew you. What have I done in those five days and what have I seen? This morning I woke up to the frenetic street noise of Ho Chi Minh City, that recycled trauma of car and motor scooter horns, of grit and yelling, of dogs barking and blind men playing electric guitars. In my bed, I stared at the ceiling fan that I don’t use. My hotel room has air conditioning and a ceiling fan, so why use the ceiling fan when there’s air conditioning? I guess that it doesn’t matter, never mind. Do you know of this city? You certainly don’t know of this street, or this hotel or how last night, after watching a crummy movie on HBO, I shut off the TV and felt my eyes shudder. They did that for a few seconds and then I turned my head slightly. I shut off the light, laid in the darkness and listened to the city age, die and be reborn. In that time and until sleep took me away, I thought of you. Six hours away on Phnom Penh’s riverfront.

This morning when I awoke, you were still there. Like electricity from a switch that you can’t turn off. Shooting through my every vein and artery, squeezing my insides together, hanging from the back of my throat. Right there, always within reach, but untouchable all the same.

The only option was to think and so I continued thinking the same thoughts that I’ve been thinking for five straight days. How your shoulders must ache after a full day and evening of walking those streets, your red plastic basket of books strapped to you with a sarong. Weaving in and out of the guys imploring tuk-tuk rides, the sale of marijuana and opium. Weaving down those uneven, cracked and crowded city sidewalks. I thought about your tiny face smiling and the way you walked around calm and cool in dirty blue jeans and a faded plain t-shirt, whipping your arm about, trying to learn how to snap your fingers. I thought about your voice, the way it had confidence in a language that wasn’t yours, the way it dealt in cash and prices and haggling rather than fairy tales, candy or Barbie dolls. You asked me if I knew USA, as if it were a friend or acquaintance I’d once come in contact with, and when I said yes, that I did know USA, you asked me “What’s up, Doc?”

The truth is, I don’t know what’s up, Gia. I don’t have a clue anymore. Because you shouldn’t be there, selling photocopied books on Pol Pot and The Killing Fields. None of you should be out there. Not you, nor the boy with his dishevelled black hair smeared into a greasy dorsal fin and certainly not the filthy five-year-olds in rags, barely managing to lug around their infant brothers and sisters, pointing at their open mouths. Those dark and empty spots, wee black knot holes in scraggly leafless trees.

When you told me that you wanted to be a teacher when you grew up I wanted to tell you that you could do it, that anything is possible if you worked hard. I wanted to set aside the fact that thirty-five percent of your countrymen and women live off less than fifty cents USA a day and that such a statistic should in no way deter you from being who you wanted to be. But I didn’t. Instead I smiled and nodded because I had no voice and the traffic on the street was too loud to challenge with words. And every day after that when I talked with you, joked with you; when I’d leave and walk on, everything has been different. Every movement, thought, plan and desire I had from then on was immediately neutralized to sheer frivolity. Sitting in a gorgeous café overlooking the muddy Tonlé Sap waters, chocolate truffle cake on my lips and a cup of Earl Grey in my hand, I was a prick. In the muddy red haze of the city’s breath, I was unable to justify anything about who I was or why I was that way. Did you know? Was this your plan all along? To unravel like a slow piano elegy until you had me hanging by my fingernails? It would be so much easier to say that yes, that was the case, but on this one I know better.

So I gave you cookies and a Little Mermaid pencil and a rainbow ink pen and I don’t know who I was hoping would feel better—me or you, but it certainly didn’t end up being me. I told you that I’d see you later even though I knew I was leaving early the next morning. With that simple sentence I became everything that you’ve grown accustomed to: pledges that don’t ring true and faces that peek into your life only to be whisked away within days. Was I sparing your feelings or mine?

That night, I sat in my air-conditioned hotel room and watched the city below my window fall into darkness, the streetlamps flickering before passing out. They too turned away from this place and its hold, but at least their reason for doing so was an acceptable one. You were out there with your books. I sat down on my bed, flipped through the channels on my TV, and settled for a movie on HBO.