There’s a Free Breakfast at the Heartbreak Hotel on Khaosan

Anonymous Are you really a PCVif you’ve never cried on a late-night bus ride? Never felt tears trace your stress-creased facefalling, speckling, seeding the rice fields over which you bridge, drivelistening to Leon Bridges lyricize on heavy headphones heading home to your host family’s house;the too-far-gone forlorn farang in a far-flung foreign fairy tale of durian and two weeks too latebirthday mail once more fleeing from the City of Angels? 

Do you think I’m being foolish if I don’t rush in?

 Do you ever wake wearily on that well-worn walking-streetwallet in pocket but loose baht pick-pocketed, long gone? Ever feel these salad days are a lackadaisical daze ofhazy emotions: mad sad maybe a tad crazy so you put pencil to paper, pen poetic, set the page ablazehands hastily diarizing the phrases your brain relays creatively unfazed despite your lazy morning-after gaze, sight obscuredby rays of early sunlight heating the creeks on your cheeks through the yellow-green taxi’s window, articulating so to explore that obfuscatingfrustrating though beautiful amazing maize maze of feelings that sways, winds litters your mind with right turns and wrong ways?Yeah — me neither. Have you ever been in the soot-black bean bags back by the barfists balled to a torrent of hot tears wondering why the fuckyou’re still here still feeling this way that you are? Ever laid in Lumphini Park for a sundress caress, a current of colored cottonsurging to touch glowing, flowing across hips, curves but soon after eyes close to meet lips to lips you’re backseated near the rear of the bus, tear streaked wishing you had just bought the hostel bedinstead of the palace hotel room? 

I too hope we can meet again.