At 24 I felt fully formed and independent, packed with personality and opinions, a self sufficient adventurer tackling Southeast Asia for a month before beginning law school. Looking back, I wonder whether I really had any idea who I was.
If anything was clear, I was a New Yorker. Having made my first home there after college and lived through the metropolitan-scale crucible of September 11 (trust me, it was different being there), New York was in my blood and psyche. While The City is an indelible part of me and still feels affirmingly homey when I visit, it's becoming harder and hard to envision my current self as a part of it. My roots are now sunk deeply on the other coast in a city that quaintly also deems itself "the."
Two weeks before I left New York I kissed another man for the first time. Though I had imagined the moment for years, the sandpaperyness of Ignacio's stubble against my skin, came as an unexpected shock that still lingers at the base of my spine. Shakira belted out of cheap computer speakers. Stories of the exploration that was to come are better shared over a bottle of wine, perhaps in the home that I will soon be nested into withy fiancé, a word that still refuses to roll off my fingers.
Law school had not retrained my brain. My desire to fight for sexual and racial equality still roiled aspirationally. I had yet to meet many friends who have changed my outlook and who I carry at the core of my being. My parents, at least a couple of them, were still married, to each other. I had a nearly full set of living grandparents. And on and on.
I was still questing. Pushing my boundaries to see what I really liked. What and who I despised. What felt so thrilling and self affirming that I wanted to build my life around it. And what inexplicably left me isolated and insecure, even though it seemed like fun.
On my first trip to Bangkok I remember laying alone at night in a tiny undecorated Koh San road hostel, having fled a cafe showing a bootlegged copy of AI after feeling marginal amongst backpackers who all seemed to form effortless drunken bonds. Wandering through Patpong, intrigued and terrified. A road trip to Ayutthaya with a relative of a friend's uncle's wife, slowly realizing that perhaps he had hoped his granddaughter and I might hit it off as more than just day trip companions. The joy of sightseeing with a pair of British nurses who I had met in Laos the week before, glowingly pleased at random improbable connections in a chaotic world.
I lay down now to sleep in the cozy home of my friend's parents, with my boyfriend on the trundle bed next to me, thrumming at what Bangkok (and a half dozen brand new places) will be like this time, with me as I have evolved and solidified over the last twelve years.
