Lost or Found?

My love had driven me into exile. Forced to live away from family and friends in a foreign country. The love of my life had refused me life back in my home country of The States and caused me to "need" to live in South East Asia. Thailand specifically is where my love had driven me.

I’d fallen big-time in the early 80’s. On a trip to trek in the Himalayan Mountains I had stopped over in Thailand. I stayed on a beach called Hua Hin. There in a book shop I found a copy of Joseph Conrad’s "Heart of Darkness".

I should not have read that book there and then, on the beach in Thailand while I falling in love. My love intermingled with a search for my own personal heart of darkness in the bars and dance halls at night, in the dreams and nightmares of my sleep and in the screaming, blistering mornings of chronic hangover and stumbling around hotel rooms under ceiling fans in stinking humidity and heat cursing at nobody who was there.

My love became tainted with a search for something inherently evil, some form of darkness in which to hide from the world. My love and I hid in there for some time.

It took years to come out of there. I had been forced to return to The States - my heart wrenched from my very chest as I left my love behind in Thailand. But I carried the spirit of my love with me - I had not left my love at all, I’d just left my love behind me in another country.

I struggled for years to break free from that love, that dark and strange love. It held me bound as I struggled to find a life apart from it. I failed. I fell further and further into desperation and disintegration, my life fell apart. I went away for a long time.

Then I could take it no more. My love called me to return. A window of opportunity opened and my love demanded that I return. The years had worn some of the sharp, hard edges from my love. It was not so dark now, small lights had crept in. The blackness had faded to grey.

When I got back to Thailand - my true love, I met Phen, a real lover of flesh and blood with little or no darkness in her heart. I’d fallen in love with a country and perverted that love into some strange, dark yearning, almost a self-destruction / self-deconstruction.

Phen was a free spirit, a kind of Thai Gipsy, part Lao part Thai. A fiery temper, real attitude and fully street-wise, she was and is a dauntingly memorable person when you meet her.

Three years together in Thailand and it is still a struggle, but now at least my true love and my real lover co-exist happily together. Phen would not leave Thailand if you payed her a million dollars to do so. I am still in exile, but it is not so lonely now. And it is not dark at all any more.

I’d fallen in love with South East Asia in general and Thailand specifically. That love had bound my life for almost 15 years. Bound it like chains you could not break. But now flesh had met with my soul and re-bound me into a new life. Phen and I strive for happiness here, or at least the strong illusion of such. I think and feel that we are finding it.

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