#ltip

Actually, let's break this down.

ITSAY: If there is one thing to say about ITSAY, it is that this series is relentless. It does not let up. From the camera to the writing to the acting to the edit, it is technically flawless and ceaselessly devastating. It is an audiovisual machine made of gold and steel and emotional violence. The camera lingers on scenes for perfectly unsettling or soul-crushing lengths of time. Everyone is acting their asses off, and the tears flow at least once an episode. The setting and set design are both visually impressive, taking advantage of gorgeous natural landscapes. The music is intense and unforgettable (and unfortunately the lyrics about separation and struggle are narratively resonant for the lead couple). And the story itself is maddeningly well-written.

The key to understanding the events of ITSAY (and IPYTM) is that Teh is a chaos demon, and he's a chaos demon in a very specific way. He has an MO. Teh will act like an uncomfortable situation with Oh-aew is fine, then he will get caught up in it and make everything worse, and then he will try to fix it by doing the thing that would have helped earlier too late. You would think this would get old, but although the pattern remains the same, Teh finds new ways to fuck it up every single time, and the time it takes to fix it ranges from years after the fact to a just few hours (but also too late).

ITSAY starts with my favorite trope, the play-within-a-play Sword Over the Moon, as Teh reflects on a falling out he had with his childhood friend Oh-aew, a tale that marks the first time i nearly sobbed during the first episode. I sometimes say i don't need a lot of angst and trauma, but maybe i be lying, because this flashback works on every level for me. It shows how they were once so close that Teh could tell when Oh-aew needed his back scratched, and it also shows how Teh's chaos demon behavior caused the first and longest-lasting rupture in their relationship. Teh, who wants to be an actor more than anything, giving the lead spot in the school play to Oh-aew should be heartwarming and selfless, but the thing about Teh is that he loves to pretend something is fine while secretly resenting every moment of it, and it blows up in both of their faces when Teh insults Oh-aew and they stop speaking to each other for most of the next decade. Now attending Mandarin classes to prepare for college, Teh, who is an incredibly proud (read: stubborn) person, sees Oh-aew again for the first time in years, and his first instinct is to fortify their grudge by just being The Worst, gloating over Oh-aew's low grades and struggle to learn while their mutual friends try very hard to keep the peace. This culminates in Oh-aew's first of many breakdowns when he flunks a test, and Teh finally snaps out of their stupid, largely one-sided beef to offer to be Oh-aew's tutor. (And to his credit, he is a very good and thoughtful tutor, exactingly tailoring flashcards and scrapbooks to fit his pupil's learning style.)

Two of Teh's other chaos demon arcs run on roughly parallel tracks from this point through the finale of the series. First, he offers to play wingman to help Oh-aew find out whether their friend Bass has a crush on him (spoiler: he does), and second, he tries to keep a promise to his friend Tarn that they will start dating once she's gotten accepted to university. Shockingly, Teh pretends that both of these situations are totally fine and tenable, but he comes to secretly resent them until they blow up in his face! He grows increasingly jealous of Bass and eager to have moments with Oh-aew all to himself, to the point where he starts blowing off his alleged future girlfriend to tutor him. He even wakes up at 4 am for Oh-aew, when he never sacrifices a minute of sleep for Tarn! (And oh, she notices.) I will say that Teh and Oh-aew's scenes together are lovely, and there is a brilliant homoerotic moment where their childhood back-scratching ritual turns literally orgasmic, in a very subtle metaphor for the changing dynamic of their friendship. And at some point, Teh and Oh-aew make a pact that, when they've both been accepted to their dream school, they will run all the way from Teh's place to the tip of Promthep Cape to watch the sunset. Put a pin in that. After a practice run, Teh helpfully explains the lyrics of the ominous and thematically resonant song about separated lovers, which i'm sure will in no way foreshadow the rest of the series.

Except it does. ITSAY delivers catastrophe after catastrophe before it finally crashes headlong into a happy ending. After a hot minute of not enough emotional disasters happening to our lead couple, we get what i affectionately refer to as the Dark Blue Kiss (2019) scene, because in the middle of their romantic beach rendezvous we get a stunningly cinematic underwater kiss (surprise!), and then everything goes to shit. Oh-aew more or less asks if this means Teh is ready to be more than friends, and Teh more or less says…nah, things are fine! To no one's surprise but Teh's, this is the Wrong Response! Oh-aew gets to have another spiraling, sobbing breakdown, culminating in him trying on a little red bra and impulsively posting it to Instagram before deleting it thirty seconds later. Teh turns to Tarn to make her an Oh-aew substitute, which, again to no one's surprise, Does Not Work! Teh gets an early admission offer from his dream school, and at the last minute he withdraws from the application process so Oh-aew, the first alternate, can get in without having to take the Mandarin test. Teh thinks this is an apology! Oh-aew thinks it's an underhanded dig at his intelligence! They snipe at each other using passive-aggressive Instagram stories (and the incorporation of social media into the narrative of ITSAY is brilliantly done in general, for the record), and then Teh has a massive breakdown when he realizes (a) oh shit, he loves Oh-aew and has fucked up their relationship yet again, and (b) oh shit, he has fucked up his own future by sacrificing his place at his dream school, and now he has to catch up on all the classes he's been skipping. The fucking around has occurred; the finding out is nigh.

Before i talk about how it ends, i want to run through some of the other characters i like in ITSAY.

The other members of Teh and Oh-aew's friend group, MoRaoYuLok, are difficult for me to talk about as individuals (except for Bass), but collectively i enjoy their presence onscreen and the ways they step in to do damage control whenever Teh and Oh-aew are imploding. They are surprisingly mature for a bunch of high school boys, particularly in comparison to the emotional antics that Teh and Oh-aew (mostly Teh) rope them into.

I love Hoon! He's a great older brother to Teh, even as Teh resents him for being a standard he cannot live up to. Hoon truly loves his little brother, and his immediate acceptance of Teh when he confesses he loves Oh-aew is beautiful. I bet Hoon gives great hugs. I want Hoon to hug me.

My feelings about Sui, Hoon and Teh's mom, are complex in ITSAY (i feel slightly attacked by Teh's desire to please her with academic and heterosexual performance, and her reaction when she learns he gave up his early admission to college is brutal), but i come to like her as well. (Her actor absolutely kills it.)

I like that Tarn gets to be a whole human being and that she responds to Teh's chaos demon behavior in relatable and complex ways. She buries her feelings of suspicion and jealousy, she gets angry and blows up, she sympathizes and swallows her sadness when Teh needs her to be just a friend. The portait she gifts him with the purple hibiscus in his breast pocket? Devastating. We'll get to it.

Finally, Bass. Just an absolute sweetheart. It's unfortunate that he gets bulldozed by Teh, but he's a good egg, and a good friend. Sometimes, all you can do is be quietly there for someone who is having an absolute time of it, and Bass has perfected the art of being there.

In the finale, Teh and Oh-aew run into each other before taking the normal admissions exam. Oh-aew is doing alright, all things considered. He and Bass are an item now, and thanks to Bass's continued tutoring (since Teh was definitely fired from that position), he scores high enough to get into their dream school. Teh, on the other hand, is thoroughly shook. He's literally shaking, crying, about to throw up, and he spends so much time trying to pull it together in the bathroom that he can't finish the exam, and he ends up only getting into his second-choice school. In the fallout, Oh-aew realizes that he can't stop thinking about Teh and breaks it off with Bass. The day comes when they promised they would run together, and while Oh-aew starts it alone, he soon runs into Teh, and they at last get their love confession moment and the tiniest bit of cathartic triumph. ITSAY, at long last, is over. Thank god.

There are several visual/symbolic motifs that come through in ITSAY, including (of course) the titular sunsets, which symbolize desire: The characters literally yell their dreams at the sun. But two of my favorites include hibiscus and coconuts. Let's start with the latter: Teh starts out absolutely hating coconuts, even though his mom and brother claim they bring good luck and the water gives you energy. Teh, however, likes the way Oh-aew smells. Oh-aew uses coconut scented shampoo. He's always used it. Teh suddenly likes coconuts again. In the finale, he literally brings a sidecar full of coconuts to keep them hydrated during the long, hot journey down to the cape. Coconuts as character growth. It's fun! The seond symbol is more interesting, though, and more charged. There is a color-coded hibiscus motif in ITSAY, where Tarn is represented by the purple hibiscus Teh notices while staring at her underwear, and Oh-aew is represented by the red hibiscus that he tucks in his hair during the MoRaoYuLok studycation. It's a subliminal battle that only Tarn seems fully aware of, which means she's the only person who sees when she's lost. When Tarn asks Teh to pick a color for the hibiscus she's sketching, thinking he'll pick purple, he picks red. When Oh-aew puts on the red bra, it's because he thinks that if he were a girl Teh would accept his love, but narratively the audience has the dramatic irony of knowing it's actually a battle between red and purple, and that Teh will choose him regardless, in the end. And when Tarn shows up with the portrait of Teh in full Sword Over the Moon regalia, she's drawn a little purple hibiscus into it, half-aware at the time she did so that she has no such place so close to his heart, and that he is prepared to break hers. It hurts deliciously. I love it.

Thematically, i would say that the primary message of ITSAY is that you cannot unfuck the past; you can only do the right thing now and grow into the future. Teh is constantly fucking up, and when he tries to fix his problems, it goes awry because he is acting as if he can repair the situation retrospectively. It's only in his final act of atonement, when he realizes he can still keep his promise and be there for Oh-aew in that moment, that we finally see them reach a point of resolution. There is also a cyclic element to the theme here: There is always another sunset. There is always another chance to get it right, though it may not be the same one as yesterday. This emphasis on cycles becomes much more impotant in IPTYM, as do the consequences of Teh's actions.

And because it bears mentioning somewhere: Every actor in this series can cry like a motherfucker. Which is good, because they all have to.

LTIP: With this short film existing mainly to bridge the gap between ITSAY and IPTYM and bid farewell to the locations in Phuket, you might expect LTIP to be a sentimental but ultimately fairly benign fifteen minutes. Instead, it haunts and vexes me. The show is about saying goodbye to the boys' hometown, but even as they're visiting their favorite locations, they notice the ways it's already changing around them and wondering what changes the future will bring. This ominous melancholy increases when Oh-aew gets a fortune telling him that happy times will come to an end. Well goddamn! They literally just started being happy in the last ten minutes of the ITSAY finale and it's already over. LTIP is rude. The camera here continues to push the narrative forward, and LTIP does not skimp on the visual appeal, either. The final lingering image we have is of Teh and Oh-aew riding toward the horizon, as sunset transitions into twilight over Phuket, soon to be the vast moonlit expanse of night. This short film really does make me appreciate how pretty the setting of ITSAY was, and it visually and thematically sets the stage for the arrival of IPYTM, for although their story is headed to Bangkok, everything that happened in Phuket will follow them and shape the rest of their lives.

IPYTM: I'm not gonna lie, IPYTM worried me. I had heard about the cheating plotline, and i had just watched ITSAY and LTIP care very little about my feelings, and i was unsure if i was prepared to endure another five-odd hours of whatever i had just experienced. But as it turns out, IPYTM shifted the vibe significantly. My immediate thought after finishing it was that if ITSAY is all gold and steel, then IPYTM is all silver and glass shards. It feels less weighty, but it still cuts. The camera's gaze is not quite as aggressive, but it still presses in and lingers on scenes just long enough to build tension or let it snap. The actors are still giving it 110% in every shot. The sets and setting are still beautiful, but there's much more concrete and glass. The music shifts to something more subdued. And the script and the edit make the passage of time an important character in its own right, via timeskips that i respect because of their narrative utility (IPYTM is an anthology of stories from Teh and Oh-aew's college years bound into one overarching narrative) and thematic resonance (the timeskips highlight the importance of cycles).

First episode is the lightest and the funniest of the entire saga, and it is a joyous relief. It starts a couple weeks before LTIP, which threw me for a hot second, but i love a scene that normalizes condom usage, and the two of them are absolute dorks about it. Fastforward to Bangkok and university, and I love Sui being supportive of Teh with the couple's red envelopes. I love their date where they go to the aquarium and are just insufferably lovey toward one another. I love that the conflict in this episode stems directly from the consequences of Teh's actions in ITSAY: While Oh-aew lives only a few minutes from his campus, Teh's school is across town from Oh-aew's apartment, so if he stays with Oh-aew, he won't make it to any of his classes on time. It's smart writing (as if i expected any less). The fact that they have to be apart most days of the week continues to spiral into the rest of the conflicts of this series. We already see that Oh-aew would have had a full-on meltdown being on his own in Bangkok if he wasn't immediately adopted by my FAVORITE side characters, the friend group of Q, Auu, Plug, and Maengpong, who are all simply delightful people. These fellow first-year students see Oh-aew homesick and on the verge of bawling, and immediately they decide he's their new best friend. They never stop being delightful in every conceivable way. (Teh, meanwhile, has a bunch of new acting friends, and we will get to one of them right about…now.)

So the first episode wasn't so bad. In the second one, we get a little timeskip as Teh and Oh-aew are settling into their college era, and we get a new challenge: employment. Teh and Oh-aew both want to be actors, so they head to a casting call with Teh's friend Khim (whomst we stan) to see about getting one of them commercial roles. Teh does a great job, but Khim looks too mature for her part, and Oh-aew is too femme, and the commentary they get during their auditions cuts. Khim has a good long cry about it, but then steels her resolve and basically says she's willing to do however many auditions it takes to get a role. Oh-aew, on the other hand, immediately sees the writing on the wall, and he knows deep down this is not the path for him. When he tells Teh, who is still fantasizing about them one day doing a show together, it blows up into a whole thing. Teh accuses Oh-aew of being indecisive and quitting after only one try, unlike Khim, who never quits (put a pin in it!). Oh-aew stands his ground. (Good for him!) They fight a bit, but they eventually communicate like two adults in a healthy relationship ought to, and everything is fine (…put a pin in that too). I like that we get incisive commentary on how women and gender non-conforming men are treated by the entertainment industry, and while that thematic aspect is mostly contained to this episode, its consequences certainly are not. Also, remember that time i said Teh loved that Khim never gives up on her dreams? Surprise! He blows up at her for becoming a flight attendant, because (shocker) he still harbors lingering resentment for Oh-aew changing his career plans, which surely won't bubble to the surface again. (Khim, by the way, handles this all with a surprising amount of compassion and grace. Couldn't be me.) We also get more of Oh-aew and his new friends here, hanging out and having a good time. Love them.

What could possibly go wrong?

Midway through IPYTM, we get a new play-within-a-play, and it's getting meta: Jai is directing a play he wrote called (wait for it) I Promised You the Moon, a story about the slow collapse of a relationship. (Here we fuckin' go.) Teh and Oh-aew are now a couple years into their relationship, and Oh-aew has bright red hair and a new vibe, leaving Teh feeling a bit cold, which means it's nearly time for him to be a chaos demon again. This time, though, Oh-aew also gets up to some chaos demon antics of his own, a character development that i love for him. This is also, unfortunately, the arc where Teh where fucks up the hardest.

Let's start with some fun news: Plug and Maengpong are dating now! They are a Z-couple to the overall plot at best, but still. Good for them, and also good for Oh-aew lucking into a queer friend group. And Teh does recruit Oh-aew, now a marketing student, into helping promote Jai's new play! So they're connecting both of their strengths and interests in a mature way without bulldozing or sniping at each other! They even have unsettling, Jai-orchestrated sex!

Unfortunately, things start to snowball. Oh-aew has a huge project with the Q-crew, who are all also in marketing, and Teh, feeling distant and jealous, suddenly has extra time to spend hanging around Jai (derogatory), who is stringing Teh along to try to coax a believable romantic performance out of him in his play. Teh's resentment bubbles to the surface again (who could've seen this coming?) and he mocks Oh-aew for changing majors again at dinner, where Khim catches a few strays. Oh-aew gets suspicious of Teh and reads his private acting log (a little chaotic and girlboss of him, i think), and then catches him and Jai making out in an…acting workshop. Teh and Jai convince him, somehow, that there's no deeper meaning to it. Oh-aew believes it, mostly, and Jai means it, mostly, but you know who doesn't? Teh, who continues chasing Jai like a lost dog. All of this culminates in a final longing glance from Teh to Jai, which Oh-aew obviously sees, because Teh does it right in front of him, and their relationship finally crumbles under the weight of the everything. Big oof. All of this happens so frenetically over the course of two episodes that it's hard to catch a breath, particularly when the suspense builds to Teh getting caught. Oh-aew and Teh have a sobbing, bawling, messy final breakup conversation at the Q-crew hangout, where Oh-aew finally puts his foot down, and Teh is forced to walk out of his life for good. (You don't even need to put a pin in this one, we're already there.)

And thus we arrive at the finale of the saga, the last episode of IPYTM. We have a respectable final timeskip of a year or so from the chaos, and Oh-aew is thriving. Even though he's still got some residual feelings for Teh, they have mostly mellowed into bittersweet but distant fondness. Love that for him; it doesn't last. Teh, on the other hand, runs into Oh-aew at work one (1) time and finds his chaos demon heart completely undone (on brand), so much so that he writes the THIRD play-within-a-play (i have been blessed) of their relationship, which he calls (wait for it) I Told Sunset About You. He (of course) invites Oh-aew to the premiere without telling him what the play is about, and suddenly Oh-aew's distant, residual feelings of fondness are much less distant, residual, and fond. Classic return to form! Great work, everybody.

I actually love the messy and dramatic way this last episode leads to their happy(?—we'll get to it) ending. It feels organic to the vibe of their whole story. Oh-aew asks Bass for his advice, and Bass basically tells him there's no way to know whether his happiness with Teh is guaranteed if they get back together, but clearly even being apart they aren't able to leave each other alone. Cut to Hoon and Nazumi's wedding, and Oh-aew, continuing to embrace his own inner chaos demon, shows up late, just in time to catch the bouquet. Oh-aew and Teh talk on the beach, where Oh-aew delivers a whole speech about how they are not the same people they were, and they'll keep changing forever, and Teh better be serious about loving him. At the end of the episode, Teh manages to cram in one last chaos demon moment by posting a picture of them on Instagram, a thing he is not supposed to do, and we get a montage of the reactions from all of their exasperated but supportive friends, which is a nice touch. (Tarn is doing fine! Khim and Top are dating! Jai is bathed in shadow and looks vaguely unsatisfied! Good for them.) A neat and tidy conclusion, except it isn't completely, for reasons we'll get to in a hot sec.

But before that, let's unpack some visual motifs. In much the same way as ITSAY loves a sunset, IPYTM emphasizes the full moon in several conversations between Teh and Oh-aew, indicating the cyclical nature of their relationship and their promises to each other (the moon always returns / the moon always—i / always am—the moon / returns—faithful—). We also have a callback motif to ITSAY, but tweaked slightly to keep it fresh. IPYTM gives us red vs. purple redux, but instead of red and purple hibiscus representing Teh's choice between Oh-aew and Tarn, it becomes a bit more nebulous. Red this time obviously and directly indicates Oh-aew, as his hair literally signals its narrative importance. (And, if we go all the way back to the first episode of IPYTM, we recall that Sui gives Teh and Oh-aew the red envelopes, which both directly symbolize good fortune and indirectly symbolize, through narrative context, the bond between Teh and Oh-aew in this new chapter of their lives.) Purple in IPYTM now represents Jai, and it also takes on a number of secondary associations through the play-within-a-play trope. The primary symbol Jai uses in I Promised You the Moon is aged plum wine, which is how he comes to be associated with this color, and the fact that it is fermented and left to age also suggests stagnation and decay, which is why it works symbolically within the context of the play. But outside of the play, we also learn that plum wine symbolizes the actual end of Jai's relationship. So when Teh first drinks the plum wine, all of this other information has already been bound up in his decision via the color motifs, including the context of his first struggle in ITSAY to choose between red and purple hibiscus. His infatuation with Jai and the subsequent downfall of his relationship become a narrative inevitability. Finally, there is the visual motif of the sunflowers that Oh-aew brings Teh after each play, versus the final, all-white bouquet he presents him with after the wedding. (I really wanted these to be moonflowers, but it looks to be mostly white roses. Probably budget cuts.) This represents the transition from the primacy of idealized desire (sun = sunset = desire; context of acting being Teh's dream) to the primacy of faithfulness (white = moon = cycles = return; context of the wedding) in their relationship.

IPYTM contains the same theme about the inability to unfuck the past as ITSAY, but here there is a much clearer tension between cyclical behavior and the passage of linear time. This series asks two related questions, and while one does get answered, the other remains frustratingly open. First, can we recreate the past? Yes, but only to an extent. It's what Teh spends the finale doing, and he kinda succeeds with his play in literally remaking his relationship with Oh-aew! But it cannot be the same past, because we know that past is unfuckable. It's not a reset, but a redo. The memories remain. The second question: Are we doomed to relive the past? That's the question that clearly haunts Oh-aew, and it's the question that does not have an answer, even as Teh and Oh-aew do get their (alleged) happy ending. In one sense, you cannot know whether the future will be different; in another sense, you can only know that it will not be the same. The moon always returns, and relationships will always have both good times and bad. But how the people change? Only time will tell.

And if i may briefly engage in Teh apologia (not really, it's more about theme), he's not the only heartbreaker in their story. When Teh hurts others' feelings, everybody notices, because he is usually acting brash and chaotic about it. But Oh-aew makes choices that hurt people as well, including Bass in ITSAY, Q in IPYTM, and, yes, even Teh himself. His acts are usually more deliberate, and he treats these decisions with admirable kindness and grace, but i appreciate that the narrative still allows these moments to impact others emotionally. There may be a wrong reason or a right reason to hurt someone else, or a better or worse way to do it, but all of us, at some point or another, will both give and receive that pain. We will hurt others—even ourselves—no matter how careful the choices we make.

Also, i like Teh. Yes he's a chaos demon, yes he ruins lives with his pride and his inability to let shit go, yes he's sometimes cruel. But despite the fact that he is at least one of these things at least 60% of the time that he's on screen, it never feels gratuitous. Teh is fiercely sentimental, emotionally transparent, generous and creative with his love, and his heart is a fitful, rabid thing that he doesn't fully understand. And i love Oh-aew too. He's not actually a perfect angel. He's legitimately a codependent mess who absolutely needs a real licensed therapist to talk things through with before he gives himself an aneurysm, and i'm glad he seems to be capable of growth, because lord knows he's gonna need to. And he's also incredibly kind, intuitive, and self-aware. These two are demonstrably not good for each other. They are each other's perfect match. Get ye to couple's counselling. (And quiet as it's kept, i see myself in both of them.)

TL;DR: ITSAY is a well-executed (and OVERWHELMING) television bildungsroman on its own, and LTIP packs a lot of hometown melancholy into a very small package, but for me the more balanced elements of IPYTM retroactively elevate the entire saga of Teh and Oh-aew from A-tier coming-of-age romantic drama to dynamic S-tier experience. And that's pretty fucking neat.

I had a good time, but:

My GOD is this the emotional roller coaster of a hundred lifetimes. I nearly cried twice in the FIRST episode of ITSAY and then three more times over the next four episodes. That camera does not give a SHIT about your feelings. and neither do the writers. I cannot overemphasize this point. It's a very good story overall, but my enjoyment was complicated by the fact that the narrative was as indifferent to my suffering as it was interested in its characters'.

I wish we had gotten just one scene with Teh and Tarn again in IPYTM. I have no idea what purpose it would serve except for narrative closure, but i think it would have been nice.

Character(s) entitled to financial compensation: All of them? All of them. Every character. There are a lot of devastating emotions happening here. But if i had to pick one, it's Oh-aew, without a doubt. All the other characters who get hurt by the actions of chaos demon Teh (Bass, Tarn, Khim, his mom, himself, etc.) are given enough time and space to heal by the end of IPYTM that they're more or less coping. But i genuinely have no idea if Teh and Oh-aew are going to survive the next 24 hours after the camera cuts off, let alone any fraction of a lifetime. Prayers up for Oh-aew, and may he be delivered from chaos for ever and ever. Amen.

Conclusion: This saga is a cinematic behemoth, and it deserves all the hype and acclaim it has received. By turns relentless, brooding, thoughtful, cathartic, invigorating, joyful—the story took me a thousand different places over the course of its twelve-hour run, and i will never regret having watched it. I do not know if i could handle watching it again unless i really, really needed to cry. 10/10, would recommend to the emotionally repressed.

    There’s a saying that claims if you want something done right, then you have to do it yourself. Teh agrees with that. If Oh-Aew is hungry, Teh will offer to prepare Oh-Aew’s favourite (hokkien-mee with vermicelli, of course). If they want to visit somewhere in town, Teh will drive the vegetable cart so Oh-Aew can just enjoy the ride. If he senses that Oh-Aew’s feeling down, Teh will ask Oh-Aew to keep him company until he falls asleep, not necessarily for Teh’s sake but because he knows it brings comfort to Oh-Aew.

    Teh doesn’t mind being the one to step up, whether it’s in his family or with his boyfriend. He likes to make Oh-Aew smile. So when Oh-Aew’s not smiling — when he’s crying, like he is right now — Teh can’t help his mind’s immediate need to come up with a list of ways to help, even though not everything has a solution.

    This is a particularly difficult case because it isn’t as simple as trying on a too-small shirt in an effort to coax an eye-roll laugh from Oh-Aew. Their childhood is coming to a predetermined close, and there’s nothing Teh can do to protect Oh-Aew from that truth. They’re going to leave Phuket. You know how there’s another cliché that says you can’t go home again? Teh didn’t understand what this meant when he was younger. Phuket isn’t going anywhere, so why would he be unable to return?

    Now that he’s watched Oh-Aew’s unbothered smile become pinched over these past weeks and Teh himself is mere days out from university, he thinks he sort of gets it. He’ll come home again, but it won’t be the home he’s been accustomed to. Like he told Oh-Aew, things have been changing even with them in town while they were there to see it. They’ll go away and return to find a place with only the echoes of the home they knew.

    Phuket will remain, but the people they were there won’t. The children they were until the day they leave… won’t remain.

    Oh-Aew cries into his arms on a beach they never cared to visit and Teh understands. To let go of all this with the certainty that they can’t get it back is… For Teh, it’s unsteadying. For someone so sensitive and tuned to the universe as Oh-Aew, it’s debilitating.

    Teh holds Oh-Aew tight, aware that he’s likely the one thing keeping him upright, and keeps a firm grip on his hand when they return to the cart. “Let me take you somewhere,” he says.

    “Somewhere else?” Oh-Aew sniffles. “I’m tired.”

    “You’ll be happy. Trust me.”

    Oh-Aew meets his eyes, unsure, and Teh nudges him under the chin with a soft grin. Oh-Aew can’t help returning the smile, as slight as it is.

    Once his boyfriend is situated in the cart, Teh announces, “You have to wear this.”

    Oh-Aew looks at the fabric in Teh’s hand. “Your shirt?” Conspiratorial, Teh folds the shirt into an uneven, bandana-like swath, motioning for Oh-Aew to stay still. “Teh, what is this?”

    “You’ll know where we’re going if I don’t blindfold you.”

    “Yeah, I got that much. Why — ”

    Teh smacks a kiss to the top of Oh-Aew’s hair and says, “No more questions, Professor.”

    Oh-Aew shakes his head, muttering, “So weird,” but he doesn’t say anything else. He’s otherwise subdued on the way as he fiddles with his fingers, and Teh knows they really need this.

    Oh-Aew stumbles a little even with Teh’s help standing from the cart, but he only laughs and whacks Teh’s arm. “You jerk!” he says loudly.

    “I didn’t let you fall on purpose!” Teh rejoins, jaw dropped.

    “That’s exactly what you’d say if you tried to sabotage me,” Oh-Aew says with a stuck-out tongue.

    “I think I’ll just dump you back into the cart and take us home.”

    As though sensing the step Teh takes away from him, Oh-Aew grabs his arm. “Oh no, you don’t! You didn’t drag me wherever we are just to turn around; I’m not a dog in a hand-bag!”

    “Yeah, you’re even yappier.”

    “Oi, Teh!”

    “Joking, joking,” Teh says, giving Oh-Aew’s arms a gentle shake. “I’ll keep you close so you don’t fall, okay?”

    “Yeah, don’t go pushing me down any cliffs.”

    “At this point I should probably say that to you,” Teh counters, and Oh-Aew snorts. His hands on Teh’s arm tightens as they move forward, though, which undercuts his apparent nonchalance. “Relax. Hold on a second.” Oh-Aew waits and regains his vice-grip on Teh as soon as he’s back by his side. “There’s some stairs, so be careful.”

    “Teh, I swear if you — ”

    “Ai’Oh, I got you.”

    Teh leads him down the rickety wooden steps and onto the sand. The familiar feeling makes Oh-Aew’s nose crinkle, eyebrows coming together.

    “Teh.” Teh removes the shirt from Oh-Aew’s eyes. “Are we —  ?” He takes in the ocean view that he’s known since junior high, and the person who had introduced this place to him back then. “Teh,” Oh-Aew says again, “I thought…”

    Teh shrugs on his shirt with a casual, “Like I’d let a little red barrier stop me,” and Oh-Aew flattens him with a look. Teh abandons buttoning in favour of pawing at Oh-Aew’s arm. “It was basically thin wood tied there with one string; I can fix it in two minutes,” he rambles. “Just, look.”

    He takes Oh-Aew by his shoulders to turn him back to the water, heartened when Oh-Aew doesn’t resist. He just takes a slow inhale, eyes closing, his posture slackening in a way it hasn’t all day, maybe even all week.

    Teh stands at Oh-Aew’s back and settles his arms around Oh-Aew’s waist. “I know you’re scared,” Teh says quietly. Oh-Aew lifts their hands to press against his stomach. “The longest we’ve been away from Phuket is, like, three days at best. But you’ll have a piece of home to keep you safe, just like I do.”

    “A life jacket?” Oh-Aew asks dryly.

    “Me,” Teh corrects him. “I have you, and you have me.”

    Oh-Aew releases a breath, turning in Teh’s arms. “I don’t want to forget, you know? All of this. We already took it for granted, like how we didn’t notice the school’s renovation. What’s gonna happen when we’re gone? We’ll just…” Oh-Aew digs his toe into the sand, shrugging. “We’ll change and we won’t notice until it’s too late.”

    Teh tugs Oh-Aew closer, their faces near one another. “Yeah, we’ll change.” He pushes his fingers through Oh-Aew’s soft hair. Without a strict dress-code, it’s longer now than Teh’s ever seen it and he never gets enough of it. “I used to hate coconut,” he points out. “You preferred cats until dear Tooty stole your heart.” A laugh is surprised from Oh-Aew and Teh grins. “Change can be good sometimes.” Oh-Aew nods slowly, picking at the shoulder seam of Teh’s shirt. “What’re you thinking?”

    “I’m thinking… You trespassed onto a beach for me.”

    “It’s hardly trespassing when the gate is — ”

    Oh-Aew squeezes Teh’s cheeks and kisses him silent, which always works; and grins at Teh’s, “Oi!” of complaint when he steps away. “It’s getting late, you hooligan; we have a sunset to catch.”

    “We can watch it here.”

    “You know it’s best at that one spot.” Teh pushes out his lip and Oh-Aew laughs, swinging his hand in Teh’s. “Aw, who’s pouting?”

    “I broke in here for you.”

    “So you admit it.” Teh throws up his arms and Oh-Aew’s laughter comes back, louder than ever. “We’ll come back,” he promises. “This is our place. That won’t change.”

    Teh nods and presses another soft kiss to Oh-Aew’s lips, their foreheads bumping where they stand together on the sand. His eyes are earnest as he starts, “Oh’, I hope you know, I do everything I do for you because I…” but he trails off into, “Last sunset in Phuket. Better not miss it.” Oh-Aew wants to ask what he had avoided saying, but Teh is already walking for the stairs.

    The ride back into town is quiet, with Teh reaching for Oh-Aew’s hand like he always does whenever they come to a sign or light. Teh’s joked that he likes having to stop because it means getting to hold Oh-Aew’s hand, even for a few moments. His sweet boyfriend who fancies himself the solver of Oh-Aew’s problems and dislikes being apart for too long. Oh-Aew pretends not to find it endearing, but he does. He really does.

    An hour later, the sun a few minutes from setting and Teh’s arm pressed snug to his, Oh-Aew hears from his right, “I love you,” the very words Oh-Aew’s saved in his mouth every day for months.

    Teh’s eyes are as earnest as they’d been at the water, and Oh-Aew knows this must be what Teh had meant to say. Part of Oh-Aew hadn’t been sure when Teh would ever feel comfortable enough to speak on his feelings explicitly, so to hear it this casually takes him aback. It must show on his face, because Teh clarifies that he’d wanted today to be special for Oh-Aew.

    “And I’ve never told you, not once,” Teh concludes, simple as anything.

    Oh-Aew is going to cry about this moment, maybe much later when Teh is asleep and Oh-Aew can think about how this new first of theirs will never be replicated. But for now he offers a smile.

    “Mm. I love you too,” he says, and the content glow about Teh at hearing the response floods Oh-Aew with such warmth that if anyone asked him to describe what he’s feeling, he couldn’t possibly try.

    This is one of their final firsts; and for fear of what’s to come, for the bitter joy choking him, he wants to live in it forever.