One Night in Bangkok, Part deux

I wasn't allowed on my plane to Bombay. No Indian visa, layover longer than 24 hrs.

I bought a ticket to Bangkok, there was a flight leaving in two hours, which would give me a whole day, and night there. Other than my layover on the way to India, I hadn't been to Bangkok since 1998. And when I arrived at the gate, it was the same one I had stood at with my oily fingers against the glass looking out at my father's casket on the luggage cart on the tarmac. Our flight that day was to Manila, to bring his body home. I remember my mother and my sister and I, all puffy eyed under sunglasses and dressed in black, our long hair neatly tied back. I caught my reflection in my new messy short hair, pink scarf, yellow shirt, blue jacket, 5 dollar Sri Lankan bargain grey blue and green pinstripe Anthropologie trousers. That was a long time ago, and funny enough, I took that same flight home the next day.

I checked myself in a nice hotel near the airport. It felt so grown up and a bit out of a commercial. I spent most of the day in my underwear, in that life insurance or cell phone commercial lighting coming through the white muslin curtains, enjoying the clean white king size sheets and the clean tile under my feet and the cable TV. I don't know what it was, but suddenly I felt like a woman...a woman in a nice hotel, on a layover between faraway big cities, with the white apple glowing on her laptop, lying on her stomach kicking back her feet, treating herself like a queen because she fucking deserves it. And she's got to take care of herself, because nobody else will. Even snaked on the mini fridge..heehee. Fresh watermelon juice, chicken wrapped in pandan leaves, green papaya salad. Discovery channel documentary about Robert Capa (an omen!-story later). Room service and bell captain and wake up calls and all.

I met up with my cousin and we had dinner and a movie. Amityville Horror. Strange. We only lived twenty minutes from there on Long Island in the early eighties, and I remember my brother and his high school punk friends would go and spend the night there thinking they were hot shit. And here I was, nostalgic about those old Dutch colonial houses and boats on the bay in Suffolk County on the screen, in Bangkok where my father once lived, between Sri Lanka and Manila where I was born...and I found comfort in being surrounded by so many familiar things from so long ago to now, and in the middle of unknown times in this part of life. I felt at home, even though I ended up there randomly, and without any real reason or direction. It was good to be home, and far away at the same time.