Mikes Writing

memories of years

One YouTuber I like does every so often videos on his experiences in Southeast Asia. Not the day to day thing or the cost of living and the forever comparison videos. His quality is his difference I think. It’s interesting he and I lived in Hanoi back during pandemic times kind of together and apart. We actually lived not so far from each other. He was in Ba Dinh district. I was in Tay Ho. I started for months in Ba Dinh and really enjoyed it. I wanted closer to West Lake though so I moved.

His latest video here is on his year experience leaving America and first living in kampot Cambodia and now in Da Lat Vietnam. His candor and perspective are a nice change from the usual stuff expat vloggers put out here. Give it a look if you want a little perspective on one persons choices. I guess I much prefer his style to the usual onslaught of “I did this today and here’s what it costs” videos that seem to dominate my algorithm at times. It also made me realize enjoying my coffee this morning that I left almost the same time in September. Just years previously. So many big and little things have come along. Things I never thought. I think the predominant thing has to be my wife. I just never thought I would ever have someone again. I had felt for years damaged and broken. Like the 20 some years I spent and then it all failed left me brittle and fragile. My wife let me see there’s some life to go. Life to enjoy. Get mad at. Journal on.

Another thing is the life here I do have. This life in Siem Reap with how I find my days. Things have become small. Unordered. Random. Lacking in focus and direction. I never really had the last after I quit my job but lately it has been the Now of things. That’s important. We go through life on the “when and then” of it all. It all becomes a blur when we look at our reminders and tasks and notes. Our second brains fuck our lives with order and we comply. What I found is there is no order. No balance. No careful symmetry of it all. So in the almost five years what’s left. The joy of not having those things. Realizing I have nothing. And nothing works for me. It’s the no debt and no wanting stage of life now. That’s a thing that has become more and more since I left this last time but always lurked around the perimeters.

Relationships have become another thing I’ve puzzled over a lot the last years. I don’t do well with expat friendships or passing acquaintanceships. Something has seemed broken in me or them. Like there’s this artificial distance. This border wall that prohibits me from wanting what they have. Last night over beers I saw this fresh take on it. I saw this older barang man with a cute and precocious young Khmer girl. Obviously his girl friends daughter here. I could almost here that talk,

Just take her out for some. You two will be fine. She speaks good English.

Instead he took her away yelling and crying. I felt this sense of sadness. Like we spend lives wanting difference. Then we get it. It’s not the difference we want. The Khmer kids are probably the easiest to say hello to. Talk to. Share a moment. But they are kids. Chaotic and selfish and wanting. How is a three or four year old supposed to understand the mind of some old barang man? Never will happen.

So that whole thing got me thinking in my year. How it encapsulates things. How we are just different. Individual. Apart. We cannot ever join cosmically with the Khmer universe. Everyone knows. I think most Khmer people welcome the difference.

What I found is I won’t try. I will just be me. As fucked up and strange as I am. What I’ve learned is we can never change that much. We cannot adapt and adopt. Cannot go native.

Today sitting with coffee and wondering I see so many little entrees and places I have come and gone into. How my years this time framed and broke some things back in America. I’ve been told my family there disowned me. That I am subject to their approval and approbation of my life choices. When I don’t live up to those rules or conditions I am told I no longer belong in their fold. This has given me the longest pause. The deepest sadness that people so far away would ever decide such things.

All the things

They all combine and form and shape. Disappear and draw dotted lines from them to how. People are responsible and accountable for their actions. Just because time and space go by there is no lack of that ownership to me.

How all the things blend together in my years here now have let me see there’s nothing more I want in my final life acts. This wonderful and funny and sometimes strange and sad life has become not an alternative reality but my now.

It’s fun to look back. See that year for the YouTuber. See my years. Nothing can be held constant. The life here floats around in my choice of a coffee shop today. I can write and feel the moment.

The years seem to coalesce into a series of now moments. Now I do this. For no reason. I will walk today. Feel the little beer hangover and my enjoyment of too much food yesterday. Then this morning a coffee and seeing words out there silently forming.

And here they stop.