Pale morning light, bright with dust of motorbikes makes my eyes water, and I don’t know if that’s the reason, or because I’m gonna miss her.

The road that brought us here takes us there, together then apart, wanting to believe that maybe it could last, yet we carry on. We carry on. And now I watch you from afar, the girl who loves lions with flowers on her legs, now afraid to get too close, afraid to lose ourselves from loving too much without a plan.

You won’t look at me the same, won’t laugh carefree like the first few nights when this was still a dream, and the cityscape which bore a constellation of shimmering lights was the only known horizon, unlike the road which nears its end.

I’m just glad our paths have crossed, mine and the girl with tattoos who loves animals and got mad at me for making a hissing noise at a street cat one night; maybe that was the first glimpse she caught of the real me. It wasn’t personal. We’re so perfect in the beginning, so flawed eternally.

She’s finding her way and I’m finding mine.

I just hope I didn’t waste her time.

I met this girl in Bangkok. She had tattoos of lions and an eagle and of flowers and a cute accent, spoken like a melody. She said I could join her on her trip to Chiang Mai from Bangkok, for I had no reason to go back to Japan yet. She smoked cigarettes as we drank coffee in the morning. We had fun together.

But when it dawned on us that we’d be going our separate ways near the end of the second leg of our journey, she became distant. I got a cold, my nose runny and my eyes red; it wasn’t pretty.

I was embarrassed, but we both did our best. Later we got tattoos together at a shop in the city center. That night, the artist was our bartender at the local bar. We had Mai Tais and laughed about it.

I almost cried. It seemed like we got over a hitch and maybe that was it, but my eyes were itchy from the cold. The next day we’d both leave, her forward on her travels, me back to Japan.

I wrote this in the morning in my journal inside the cafe at our hostel. She sat outside talking to her friends on the phone. I liked that about her. She loved her friends and laughed with them every day. I hope she knows how cool she is, that I’d never meant to hurt her.

The dust has settled. I’m alone with my thoughts and I don’t know how to feel. Between pushing for more and finding peace with what is.

Pale morning light, bright with dust of motorbikes, asking for forgiveness. Did we ever know ourselves and what it was we’d entered, or did we merely step further into dusk, when the city cooled, the lights came on, and our hearts sought connection, a kindled spark, torched with the kinetic wave of a new city with dazzling heights and arcane sounds which timbre off the tongue — the dust has settled, the rain has ceased, and I’m waiting for a downpour.

Yet the morning sounds tell me not that the world has changed, but that I have, left with a cavern of longing, for who or for what, for a time and a place, shared when the morning sounds meant something else.

The pouring mist and crackle of the gravel road; ambient chatter and the whoosh of passing cars. The birds — the birds through the night and into morning — they haven’t stopped and why should we, for the motorbikes of Thailand glisten, the ticket to freedom, but what is there to be free from but the longing for a friend, and that I think we found and will always keep to hold, even as the roads diverge.

You got in the taxi. It was quick, and I watched you go from the place within our hearts, and then was left alone. It felt so strange, and that’s how travel is, for we never know what we’ve entered or what we’ve left, willingly stepping into pain disguised as love.