I had finally found the courage to come back and write. I have been living and living the last year and life took much away from writing, but certainly not thinking. I wrote frequently in my journal as a way of documenting myself. I have decided to rewrite the last year here as I write the present, to clarify my own life story, one that has been a series of dreams in my fatigued head.
Its hard to imagine that one year ago, on this very day, I was on board a 3rd class train from Bangkok to the ancient city of Sukhothai. I can still hear that 8 hour train ride to Phitsanoulok rattling as I travelled northward to Sukhothai...
"The 7th of July,2008
Bright yellow cracked seats, pastel green window frames and peeling blue floor boards. I'm on board an open air, one way hobo heartland to Phitsanoulok to stay for the night at some $4 hostel before continuing my journey to the old kingdom of Sukhothai. The scenary outside is pastorally pleasant - fertile green rice fields, withering shadows of slow moving men bent over at work, the occasional buffalo. The scene inside, however was a different story.
I miraculously dozed off for the first hour but woke up abruptly to the smell of dried fish. The food vendors with their big straw hats had come on board and I found myself dodging bunches of fish that were inches away from my face. The people sitting across the aisle looked at me warily - they knew i was not local. My back pack was dubiously placed on a broken luggage compartment and it's straps were loosely flapping in the wind outside the window. A kind middle aged lady with her old blind mother smiled at me from the aisle. And then there was the drunk lady sitting across from me, who had been mumbling to herself since she came on board.
Realizing I was very unfortunately placed across from her, I moved closer to the window, letting the high speed wind whip my hair around. Holding her empty Chang bottle, she moves to the seat next to me. The smell of alcohol and sadness hit me in one swift moment. No, she didn't look dirty or homeless. She just looked very drunk, but she was properly dressed and she even had a pleasant face. She tells me that she has been drinking for 2 days, since her husband left her with nothing, for another woman. Cynics will tell you to be careful, that this is how a scam begins and that you will lose your wallet in the end. Human instinct tells me she had a story to tell. In between slurring obnoxious jokes in broken english and crying while saying " I love him so much", I felt a surge of compassion at this genuinely helpless sight.
Some moments, she would break into a drunken song and apologize to me for being like this. She kept apologizing over and over, as if there was a well of guilt she had to unload. I asked her about the huge scars on her arm, they were large and evil looking like tentacles chaining her arms. She kept silent and smiled. Then she cried and told me rather irrelevantly that she was working as a construction worker to support her husband. She was on her way to look for him to see him for the last time, because she hated him and she loved him at the same time. I told her that she could be better than this, she spoke english and she knew that she was in a sorry state. "But I love him so much..." she trails off falling into deep sleep, to a place better than the one she is in now.
I realized that love, even obsessive and unfair love was the greatest thing she could achieve in her small world of pain. Love makes the smallest person feel noble and immortal, even if there was nothing heroic about how things have turned out. This is one lady who simply could not let go of the one thing that made her feel closer to humanity.
Just before I get off the train, she wakes up and tells me humbly that she was glad to have met me and to go to the temple to pray for her because she was going to end her life. She was going to leave this world, unwilling and unable to let go of her past. There is a stillness in her eyes that makes you feel like you are already staring at someone who has died. I tell her to be strong. At the next stop, she smiles at me and gets off the train in silence. Suddenly, I feel the urge to get off and tell her not to do anything stupid. In a flash, the train moves off and I look at the empty space next to me. The man who had been standing for close to 3 hours moves into the seat and offers me and the people around me rambutans and everyone eats them heartily while introducing ourselves. And that woman becomes a forgotten figure, left behind with her own forgotten past."
