Dear Mae Sai,
You’ve been a hard pill to swallow.
Downward gazes and inside jokes.
Farang, farang.
Little pointing fingers followed by a wave of giggles as my floor-length dress with the slit down the side blows wild in the breeze,
trying to contain my runaway drapery,
maintain modesty in a border town where summer dresses don’t fly.
A voice cautions from the inside:
"You’re not in the islands anymore dear one.."

Om Namah Shivaya
I murmur steadily to myself repelling thoughts of “I just want to go home.”
There is no home, not outside in the physical world at least.
This here is a recurring theme.
Now I’m really traveling.
How dislocated will you become before you eliminate outside chatter,
and go to work paving the temple solace inside yourself,
the eternal home within the eternal om,
the exterior is irrelevant.

Oh Mae Sai,
soot and smoke bellow up from your belly
placing masks on the mountains at your back,
your wretched reflection glows unforgiving in the street.
Glorious, unpainted authenticity.

**** the farangs, they’re just passing through.
Smile til my face hurts,
it mostly makes no difference,
and then when I’m feeling so unwanted that I can’t hold back the tears,
you throw me curve ***** with every passing street.

A little Burmese babe with the brightest smile
still unsure of how fast her feet will carry her,
she dashes to my right and with the smacking sound of her lips
and the grace of her palm she blows me a kiss.

Thank you sweet one,
that’s just what I needed…

People always say that we live in a 'big world.'
I tend to disagree.
Maybe it is the community that we always find ourselves settling into,
surrounding each other with familiar faces and 'worn out places.'
Applying a degree of regularity and comfort,
a safe ship to return to
To immerse in
To confide in.

I like my own company.
I like being alone.
I like being with my mind and the fresh crisp air bathing my skin in some secluded speck of greenery that I have randomly pointed to on the map.
Or maybe, sometimes, I camouflage myself amongst the commuters of that town, maybe, I will sit and watch, observing their dress senses and their faux-casual demeanor besides the 'so-called' fit human sporting a six pack and a shock of milky hair.
I don't judge, I wonder what their lives are like today.

The farangs who think that Bangkok is just like any city,
A doppelganger to London with looming giants who have a thousand eyes and crawling ants everywhere releasing odors of petroleum and cheap fried takeaway.
By ants, I mean the cars, and the people.

Cheap. Cheap. Cheap.

How wrong these people are; how pretentious one may think I sound.

This is where my small world closes in.
I gasp to burst the malleable sides of this container of air.
Intangible but still constricting, a psychological barrier, enforced by the sensitive parts of my protected brain.
A bell jar.
I step back into the thesis that is my life, bringing a kind of catharsis and composition back to it.

On my own. How I like it.

A small world in a big world.