Notes on Thailand Pt. 2
From the archive: 2015
Just before nightfall we arrive in the ancient city. You can feel it right away, the shadows of this archaic place. Something magnetic in the air, a curious gnawing at your sleeve. We find our way to a night market where we push through narrow rows of make-shift stalls brimming with a thousand new smells and sounds and colorful flavors. Moving down this sparkling, humming tunnel, the steam infuses with the humid air and leaves us covered in a layer of spicy sweat.
With jet lag still kicking around in our bones, we have a restless night of sleep. In the morning we discover that my book, Kafka On The Shore, has disappeared. Nothing else is missing, just the book. We wrack our brains trying to think of when and how I could have lost it. We’d been so careful with our things, always looking behind us and making sure to lock our backpacks. Somehow it had vanished. The book is about strange magic and time traveling spirits - it had already felt particularly fitting in a town like this. What made it more unsettling, was that I had chosen this book after reading Patti Smith’s M Train in which she declares her love for the author Haruki Murakami. In it, she writes about how she accidentally leaves her Murakami book in an airport bathroom. She writes about lost things, wondering where they go, if they exist somewhere on an island together. We felt almost certain a ghost had swiped my book and sent it off to that very island to become collected amongst those other misfits.
The loss of my book puts me in a bad mood but Greg pulls me out of it, assuring me that we will find another copy somewhere. Soon we are in good spirits again. I shower and braid my hair in homage to Patti, imagining that she and I and Haruki belong to a special club now. We pack our things and head to the ancient ruins of Ayutthaya.
We roam the sacred grounds for hours, walking amongst the dusty fragments of long ago and saying hello to all the different statues of Buddha. Crouching down, we look into the face of a 500-year-old Buddha who had been swallowed up by the roots of a tree. Just his peaceful face was peeking through; his power amplified like the Mona Lisa by all those countless eyes who have peered into his, all those others who have come to crouch and say hello.
Later we slip off our shoes and leave them at the doorway before quietly stepping inside a temple. We watch the monks carry out a ritual, chanting and wrapping a giant golden buddha in their orange cloth. I felt almost frightened, I was so in awe of it. Another temple was in a quiet garden surrounded by stone walls where dogs and cats lay dreaming in the shade of many statues.
We search for a bookstore but no luck. I decide to give it up to the universe and agree to patiently wait until we return home to get a new copy.
When the sun sets, we hire a tuk tuk to take us to a restaurant on the river where we share Singhas and a whole steamed fish. The fish was as delicious as it was spicy and though we could hardly speak to one another on account of our mouths burning, we ate the entire thing. That night we slept beautifully and in the morning we felt as if a fog had lifted. Feeling re-born, we gather our things and board a train that will take us speeding through the countryside for the next 9 hours.
By the time we reach Chaing Mai it is well after dark and we are exhausted from the journey. We buy two heaping plates of noodles from a street vendor and some beers from the 7-Eleven. Sitting on the side of the road, we devour our dinner. Later we find a hotel for the night where we drift to sleep while watching old episodes of CSI Las Vegas.
In the morning we have a breakfast of sweet coffee and banana sticky rice. We decide to do no planning or researching and just let the day take us. When we pass a bookstore, Greg asks the shop girl if they have a copy of Kafka. She tells us they don’t, but writes down an address on a scrap of paper. The address leads us off the main road and takes us down a little alleyway. When we are about midway down, Greg grabs my hand, stops us in our tracks and points to something up ahead. It’s a little hand written sign that reads The Lost Book Store. And as if this place were some kind of magic depot between our world and the island of lost things, a copy of the book was there patiently awaiting us.
In these first days, my ideas about the spirit world had begun to shift. And with this reimagining, a new understanding had been ushered in. An understanding that there are places in this world where the magic has been ingrained. Places where it has been worked into the soil by the souls of many feet. You can feel a saturation in the air from all the history, all the remnants of past lives. It isn’t just an illusion, it is an omnipresent energy pulsing across the landscape. I feel part of this lineage now. The shadows of my footsteps dancing and scattering across the country, entwined with all those sacred others.