#handsomefurs

God, today was a morning when I woke up with memories of Bangkok hitting me in the heart like a sledgehammer. The smell of warm garbage and chilli and exhaust as you walk down the streets, the neon lights and palm fronds in the wind as you ride past them on the back of a motosai at night, dressed in your best, sandals and a little dress only, and never feeling slutty for it because that's how everyone dressed. The tiny little plastic chairs and tables next to the street food stalls, yellow rice and steamed ginger chicken squeezed in-between a construction worker and the CEO of the bank across the street. Pieces of cantaloupe and pineapple and watermelon in plastic bags, fifteen baht. Even the sugar-chilli-salt mixture they put on it. The lady making juice outside my school in Silom, claiming to have the cure for everything from cancer to bad skin to depression. Rang Nam Road at night: fairy lights and steaming bowls of Tom Yum soup. Turning a corner and the five lane highway becomes a tiny alley with yellow houses and a fish pond. Going to Patpong not for the hookers but for the cheap Adidas knockoffs. But the hookers too, horsing around with us during downtime in the bar, laughing their heads off at our terrified Western faces. The amazing Mexican food by Nana Plaza, full of underage prostitutes, katoeys and overwintering ex-marines who knew their chimichangas almost as well as they knew their ping pong showtimes. The teenagers singing their Thai ballads in the funky bars of Ari. JAM Cafe and the film nights, Chula playing The Handsome Furs behind the bar. Oh, The Handsome Furs. Listening to The Handsome Furs at top volume as you navigated the BTS at night, dressed to kill, tiger print tights and platform shoes and a tiny onesie, and nobody looked twice, or, well, everyone looked twice cause you were Western, but nobody cared. Everyone was just out in the thirty degree nights to have a good time, and everything was a game, and my heart was breaking every minute of every day. The BTS aircon as always freezing but that was good, it made my eyes de-puff on the way to school so that people didn't instantly know I'd been up all night crying. Again. Trying to make it inside a car before 8am so you wouldn't have to stop for the national anthem. Buying sticky rice and pork for breakfast. Orchids everywhere, the pink petals of the gardenia tree blowing into our pool. Your wasted friend who pissed off the balcony, twenty-nine floors up, and wrote about it in the note he left before disappearing with your stereo. Still you'd insist on the parties. Said we needed to keep our social circles wide, especially so far away from home, that we couldn't let isolation catch us. You were right, but you were still wrong. It's always like this.

I am so thankful that my heart broke in Bangkok. I will never again be twenty-five and walking down those hot and colourful streets every morning, not like that, not on my way to work with my whole life falling apart. Music meant so much during that time. I was wallowing in pain and confusion, but it was real, and it was felt. Funny how the worst part has so much in common with the best: colours look brighter, sounds sound deeper, the tropical winds are like hands on your face and the smells are enough to make your chest implode. Bangkok is no longer mine but little splinters of my heart will forever mix with the rice and petals and discarded chicken's feet of her gutters.