SUNFLOWERS

I spend another day just hanging out around the old neighborhood, not feeling up to facing the crowds the traffic the noise the heat of Bangkok. The money question is solved so I treat myself to a big plate of red curry with tofu and rice and a bottle of Chang beer, pretending I am not just one more farang. I have no patience for blond tourists with tattoos and dreadlocks and thai girls in hot pants and high-heels. It’s all too vulgar, too immediately forgettable, and I hide myself head-first in the sand, like an ostrich. That’s what I would tattoo on my chest: an ostrich. My power-animal: he who hides his head in the sand. The good thing is I leave Puerto Vallarta tonight, on the ten o’clock sleeper. But then of course there is no guarantee that Chiang Mai will be any better. Once you sell your soul to the devil he never gives it back. And I’m afraid Thailand sold its soul to the devil during the Vietnam war, and the old mysterious kingdom of Siam is only a memory and a dream. But I will slowly adapt to the beer drinking and the pool playing and the sweating in the sun on some beach. We are flexible creatures. The fault is of course equally of Faust and the Devil, for pacts take more than one wilful participant (it takes two to tango), and what I hide from in shame is not Thailand, but the warped relationship between Thailand and us “western” foreigners. The thai people I have encountered outside of the tourist industry I have found to be friendly and warm and generally happy and serene, and soon I hope to pull my head out of the hole in the sand to look around in a new spirit.

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Ever since Ela left I have been suffering wounds, cuts and bruises and blisters, mostly on my two legs and feet, as if my body had found a way to mourn her absence in its own little martyrdom of blood & pus. The blisters on my feet from the new sandals are the stigmata and then there are the scratched insect bites and the bruises on my left shin and right knee where I (un)consciously bang myself against doors and furniture, or protruding nails, whereas the crown of thorns is still inside my fingers, the steep penalty payed for the romantic gesture of picking flowers in the dark of night. Every waking moment I am reminded of the pain, and before a wound has healed a new one is there.