I am lying on my two cushions/pseudo mattress with Taylor sleeping next to me on sheeted cushions of her own. A pink mosquito net hangs over us both, with the bodies of a mass army of bugs clinging to its exterior. Some have succeeded in their invasion and I can hear occasional short spurts of frenzied buzzing from the area near our feet. The room is empty save our backpacks, a small white refrigerator, and the bed I’m lying on. The room feels spacious and expectant, as if waiting for the guests of a ball to glide in and across its tiled clean floors. A door separates where we sleep and the rest of the family’s living space. It feels almost like they tried to set up a quarantine in preparation for our visit, like they were giving the foreigners a room of their own to wreak what havoc we could. Not that I feel unwelcomed or unwanted by our host family. We smile and offer the Lao greeting of “Suh-bi-dee,” (which translates literally to “Happy good” and conveniently serves as “Hello,” “How are you?” “I’m fine,” and “Goodbye”) whenever we see each other, but without a larger vocabulary it’s hard to get past what connections just laughing and friendly body language will get you. A used-to-be-white fan offers relief from the hot stickiness of the night. I close my eyes and let the nightly festival play itself out on the back of my eyelids. Wisps of sights, smells, and sounds swirl together in the chaotic and unrestrained manner of a three-ring circus contained in a cauldron of bubbling memories. Tonight the festival goes: Sprinting into the river barefoot and entirely clothed. The light of the late afternoon sun slipping into the ripples of the water, making the Mekong look like a farmers small plot of corrugated earth. The pure hilarity of flopping face-first into the water just after the sandy drop-off. Running with Robyn in the morning, feeling like an army recruit in my hiking boots and long shorts. Unintentionally herding the fleeing cows and water buffalo ahead of us off the path. Playing cards on the table after dinner. Receiving ice coffee in a mini plastic pouch from Michael because it was Women’s Day, but more because Allan guilted him into it. Watching Michael’s own pouch then break and seeing the look of horror and urgency in his eyes as he twisted his body so he could capture every escaping drop of coffee in his mouth. Balling sticky rice with the first three fingers of my right hand. Nick shining the way with his cell phone flashlight like a gremlin on a sugar high as he led us to a patch on the beach where we could stargaze. Watching Thai music videos with the giggly old man in our house whom I suspect to be slightly senile. I smile involuntarily, showing my teeth to the darkness. The loving force emitted from Paige’s eyes, like beams from a lighthouse searching for a kindred spirit. Michael’s habit while speaking to pull up his shirtsleeves as if reassuring himself of the existence of his biceps. Robyn’s absent-minded stroking of her right eyebrow when she’s lost in thought, as if in an attempt to coax the wisdom out of her head. Taking a walk on Don Daeng Island and passing cracked egg shells perched on the tips of cacti for decoration. Allana picking her favorite berries from the tree in her front yard before asking me to help because she ate all the ones she could reach. The kids on the beach who followed me as I walked down to read and stared for minutes before I gave up on solitude and played them in tic-tac-toe, repeated the words for sand and hair they taught me in a bad accent, and read them three pages of Faulkner that I don’t think even an English speaker would have understood, the whole time they sitting patiently regarding me with a deep curiosity. Sitting cross-legged on the floor at dinner describing our parents personalities, remembering I love them. Washing laundry in a tub and noticing a small heart etched in to a brick in the wall of the bathroom. What memories will the festival display? What moments, what visions, will be extracted from the past and embed themselves in my consciousness? What will my mind choose as lasting, as important? What was it I heard said today that made me want to reach out and hug the speaker in gratitude for expressing the feelings I couldn’t make into words? What minute details do I want to bring with me tomorrow? What from today will I tell my parents at the dinner table two months from now? Whose words will I enjoy hearing repeated by my own mouth when I have the choice to say anything? I wait a few minutes, indulging in blissful undirected consciousness, before allowing one of the wisps to remain long enough in my mind so that it may grow into something concrete, like a floating dandelion seed alighting on the ground in a manner neither voluntary nor preordained. But I am interrupted and reminded of my presence in the room in which I lie: Taylor’s watch chirps a declaration of ten o’clock, a precise reminder of the passing of time with a harsh certainty similar to that of a dropping guillotine – inescapable, full of momentum, and sure to end in a silence I’ll never get to hear. My own watch never makes such declarations; rather it sits patiently like a half-submerged crocodile, waiting for me to approach it willingly before it strikes (get the pun?). I’m reminded of noting the time two days ago when my watch read 4:14pm, which means it was actually 4:12 because I set it, in response to my untimely habit of being late, two minutes fast (which ironically increases the difficulty of not being late because it takes me longer to calculate the real time). I was sweating and could feel the moisture soaking through the back of my maroon collared shirt, forming what I imagined to be like a large “Foreigner” bull’s-eye for the local Lao children sitting behind me, not that they needed it to discern that I am not from here. This afternoon I had the half-hearted goal of being peacefully alone, half-hearted because I knew it was virtually unaccomplishable. I remember my feeling of resentment toward the world, for making me be an active part of it. It felt like a nagging mother, hovering over my homework when all I wanted it to do was leave the room and close the door behind it so I could be left alone. I was writing in a Wat facing the Mekong. An old monk half dressed in orange came out and presented me with a bottle of “Phoukao Drinking Water,” as naturally as if I were a frequent guest in his home. I sat at a square table on a marble bench that was too short for my sprawling legs, underneath a large tree with four main branches stemming from its thick base. There was a breeze – wonderful. A blur of blonde halved my left eye. The little black specks maddeningly close to my face that I knew to be gnats continued their flight pattern of annoyance, me having given up swatting them away days ago. A comical procession of chickens passed by, a rooster, a hen, and five awkward adolescents, all strutting proudly across the open dirt area in front of me with an apparent sense of purpose, only to turn back minutes later and strut across the dirt to the grassy patch from whence they came. The rooster spread his wings and stood on his tip-claws to better display his meager excuse for feathers. I guess you have to flaunt what you’ve got. I blew what must have seemed like an apocalyptic wind to the ant nearing my moving pen, pushing him off the page out of sight and out of mind. Paige, Heather, Jonny, Robbie, and Gabe called out to me as they passed by on the dirt path outside the temple, as if reminding me the world can and will never leave me alone. I envisioned myself as a grumpy old man, shouting out his apartment window on a Saturday night, “Would you hooligans stop hollering?!” This thought brings me to another memory, of sitting at a table on Koh Preah Island, trying to nap for the fifteen minutes before we would start work on the home garden again. Fifteen minutes hardly seemed like enough time to get a good nap in or to get all the rest I wanted. I looked at the people around me, who seemed perfectly content in hammocks or sprawled out on the table. I tried to rest, but all I could think of was the movement I would be doing in the future, and the thought that even if I did rest I’d just have to get back up and be in a state of “non-rest” again. What was the point of sleeping so I could rise to work, and work so that I could reach the time for sleeping again, and then sleep so I could reach the time of work? It was that same feeling of frustration I felt in the Wat with the impermanence of any state of being I wanted to be in. When I wanted to be alone, maybe I could for a short while, but the world would always call me back. When I wanted to rest, I could do that for fifteen minutes, but it would inevitably end. Throughout the past few weeks impermanence has frustrated me. Of course I realize the point of existence isn’t to be comfortable doing one thing your whole life, but I still feel resentment at not being able to hold on to any one feeling – and if I do, it slips almost immediately away in favor of a new one. Plane ride to tuk-tuk to guesthouse room to restaurant to squat toilet to bus to homestay to morning dirt road to afternoon heat to watery relief to dinner table conversation to mid-meal silence to fast boat to slow boat to sitting down to standing up to lugging backpacks to sprawling on the floor to running in sand to walking on wood boards to showering to dressing to sleeping to waking to beginning to ending. Anticipation to excitement to enthusiasm to relief to hunger to satisfaction to confidence to insecurity to curiosity to fatigue to calm to energetic to solitude to company to self-belittlement to self-righteousness to sentimentality to cold detachment to compassion to stubborn independence to regret to inspiration. One description can never exist on its own. Each sensation feels only fleeting. I think of what one of my high school teachers described as the meaning of life: “enjoying the process.” I know I shouldn’t be caught up on how one state of being will end, but instead enjoy that state of being while I’m in it, but I still can’t deny my intense desire to have the ability to push the “Pause” button in life, even if it’s just once. To stop in one place and in one mindset. I guess stop isn’t in life’s vocabulary. Maybe it’s largely because the nature of traveling is constant movement that I feel so unsettled by change, maybe if I were at home partaking in my daily routine I would feel less disconnected from permanence. Maybe if I could just carry one thing with me as I go from place to place I would feel less like every new moment was spent losing what I had the moment before. And of course that one thing could never be external, but maybe some peace of mind, some inner layer of my mind that stays stable when the outer layers fluctuate…Taylor mumbles softly in her sleep. From the tiny thud I hear near me I guess a fly has bashed himself against the window on my left trying to get out. I return to the present moment without having resolved anything, but having hovered around a point and not ever landing squarely on it. But the beauty of musing before sleep is that my stream-of-consciousness need not have a point or moral; rather it can drift like a wave venturing onto foreign shores before receding back into the familiar fluidity of the ocean. I recede, this time into sleep, thinking of the quote Allana read us recently: the only constant is change.