Room 302

Day 120 - Kuala Lumpur

Which animal would you be?

The people round the table sip their beer, pass the joint and give their answers,

A dragon

I say.

A goat

she says.
I the dragon, she the goat. If anything it feels the opposite right now. The next question comes,

What makes you cry?

It's turned into a an ice-breaker session at her hostel,

People that want to be together but can't be

My answers have gone from silly to soppy in a single bound but it was a reflexive answer, true and without guile. The irony of it hit me later.

I'm going to bed

she says.
Pity, I think, I enjoy her company just that bit too much.

Room 302

she says.

In case it's easier to stay.

Easier? Christ, I would find it very easy to stay. She has a boyfriend, I reluctantly know that. How easy would it be to know that and go anyway? I have another beer to consider my options and really, truly, to stop myself haring up the stairs after her. I sip and rationalise. It's probably nothing, just a friendly offer. She's committed to the guy and whatever theoretical frisson I feel between us is just that, theoretical. A pity, a tragedy even but that is how it is. As I smile serenely in front of the people round the table my mind tumbles through possibilities. Time to decide.
We inch inexorably towards it, the thing. The thing that surely only exists in my mind. The thing with rockets that exploded into life in a muddy field outside Vang Vieng. The thing that caused her to inexplicably walk me home that night. The thing that lay behind a boundary that seemed so solid until I pushed gently at the door left unlocked in the middle of it. The thing, the feeling, the impossibility in room 302. An innocent choice followed an innocent offer and we held onto that fallacy in the darkness even as we held onto each other. Tighter and tighter we squeezed the innocence of our intentions until it crumbled into sudden, frantic pieces. It was everything and it was too much. We'd stumbled too far into the jungle to simply backtrack. But neither was there a path ahead, the boundary was hastily thrown up again and any chinks or cracks were filled by the rubble of its previous incarnation. We remained there in the darkness staring at walls, exposition pointless and seeing no answers to the question that had finally been asked. No answer but unfeeling.
Neither of us spoke of it in the morning, nor in the evening but there was a new distance. We'd established ourselves as untrustworthy and now nothing could be the same. It seemed immeasurably cruel. A well of feeling in me that had lain concreted over was tapped. The day after the day after I walk the streets in the cool atmosphere of consequence and in the cold clutch of solitude. The tears do not, quite, come but that ache - low-key, hypothetic, tolerable is now distilled, fortified and bottled. I ponder the wisdom of honesty and 3AM messages. Have I traded goodbye for that 3AM honesty? It seems I have. There is no reply and it feels like none is coming. Is that down to an excess of feeling or an excess of irritation complicated by that excess of honesty? It is bad either way this unsaid farewell but I am not sure I regret my actions either. I've left so much unsaid these past years that now doing the opposite still seems better and consequences be damned. But, damn, that may be that. I talk around the subject in these lines because detail feels inappropriate. Feelings without context, only allusion, probably don't make for great reading but I don't see another way. This streak of romanticism leaps into action and feverishly knits a blanket of unreality. I cover myself with it and find that it provides no warmth. But the chill sharpens the feelings and gives them a bitter truth they don't entirely warrant. The more it hurts the more real it must be, or so goes my logic. But if I have opened the floodgates of feeling I may have to find a way to control the flow. Otherwise it may wash people away. It may already have.