A good friend and I make plans to meet on a beach on an island in Thailand.
I’m wandering around Asia with a backpack on hiatus, or a sabbatical, or hiding from real life, or engaged in something for which I don’t yet have a term. His marriage is apparently breaking apart; coming to Koh Chang probably won’t help matters, but he says he needs time away.
I tell him my ‘hotel’ name, it’s just a scattering of thin-walled huts raised off the steep hillside overlooking a thin strip of sand, up the beach, just around the bend.
He arrives late at night from Bangkok via minibus and ferry; in the morning the hut-runner, a nice Thai lady, says to me: “You friend here.”
“I certainly feel that way–thanks”, eating my muesli with bananas and yogurt. One US dollar.
In the late morning he emerges from his hut. I look up through the foliage and we smile. It’s quiet, hot, not a breath of wind or even the smallest wave to break the feeling of profound stillness. A Dali beachscape. He comes down and sits, and for fun we say nothing.
It’s the beginning of a movie, an absence of context for a moment. Anything can happen.
“I feel my lifespan increasing.”