Fernando

How I ended up in Laos for the 3rd time in two months is a miracle and a sob story all rolled into one. Kinda like life itself. We’re constantly getting over something rough only to have our hearts burst open from beauty, leaving us with confusion and joy and a question mark on the tip of our tongue.

I think I would’ve gone completely nuts had it not been for the constant “Sa Bai Dee” (hello) and “Kawp Jai Lai Lai” (thank you). I always loved the “lai lai” (pronounced like “lie”), how better to say “very much” than with an expression of delight. You can’t help but smile and feel a lightness in your chest when you hear a grown man say “Lai Lai” – or hear it coming from your own two lips.

This had come after a few weeks of pain and agony and ever-increasing love for the tattooed crazyman from Brazil. I couldn’t help myself but to keep traveling with this man, who I knew less and less as the days wore on. I continued to retreat even more into my deepest and darkest corner, waiting impatiently for him to light the match, to show me the way back to Life, back to reality, out of this sordid and confusing labyrinth of passion and power-play.

But he never did.

The only matches he lit were to light his never-ending joints and the incense that barely covered his stench. His infrequent showers and sweaty feet made our week of separate beds a blessing.

It was no surprise to me that a memory card virus destroyed all the pictures of him, of Viet Nam. An entire month wiped out: a weekend in Ha Long Bay, two weeks in Ha Noi, and a few days in my dad's old stomping grounds from his time in the Navy. This was a sad fact I learned months later in India while flirting with a brilliant internet café owner who made me feel more beautiful in five minutes than Fernando did in three months.

I can’t necessarily blame Fernando, for he did only as he knew best. He hated himself and his obvious weakness and internal ugliness, so he took it out on me.

I was just another lost soul filled with confusion, pain, fear, yet desperately hoping for someone to save me from myself. Sadly, we did not recognize that we could not save each other if we could not save ourselves, until it was too late.

We were the blind leading the blind. Or, in our case, the stoned ignoring the sad.

The night we said goodbye was the happiest and saddest day of my life up to that point. I shed not one tear at the airport (he had them pouring down his beautiful face), for I had watered the earth enough in the days previous and in the cab ride earlier that evening when he held my hand and lamented not having kissed me more and just how much he was really going to miss me. You think you want to hear how the one you love regrets not having loved you more, until these words ring throughout your empty chest, wishing he would just go away and leave you in peace.

But I was filled with excitement, jubilation, and a knowledge that once he was gone I could go back to being alive again. No longer would I be a slave to his insults, his control, his neglect. I was to be reborn in the very country where Mankind gave birth to itself. That very night I, and I alone, was going to India.

I knew I would cry the minute I stepped foot onto the sweet soil of the mother, and I was right. I was also deeply depressed. For not only was Fernando the proverbial thorn in my side for the previous three months, he was also the hand that I held, the warm body I slept next to, the lips that I kissed, the person I wanted to be with most in the world.

And now he was gone.

All I had left of him was the pit in my stomach and the pain in what was left of my heart.

It took about a month for me to realize it was truly over between us. I sat on a Pushkar rooftop in the morning sun, tears running down my face with a confused Sylvie by my side.

“Oh, honey, I thought you were over him,” she worried aloud.

“No, not yet apparently,” I took a deep and jagged breath, “I just now realized that we are never going to be together.”

No email had come, begging my forgiveness, him having seen the error of his ways once he got back home—realizing that I was “the one” and he was a fool to not have seen it before.

Nope… never came.

Better that way, I suppose, allowing me to truly get over him while wandering about on my solo spiritual quest, the plan that started this whole traveling thing in the first place.

I used to look back in shame that I almost gave up part of my India trip for him. Now I look back with pride for that shows just how much and how big I am capable of loving.

And I guess I always knew that where you seek your Truth is of no consequence—for it always is to be found wherever you are. You are the Truth. You are the Love. You are that which you seek.

I am Lucky.

I have Hope. I have Love. I have Peace.

I can only dream that Fernando has found this, as well. I pray that he knows his own Divinity, that he’s more than this tattoos, his stoned showers, his stinky feet, and his fierce Brazilian passion.

I have forgiven him as I have forgiven God, and therefore myself.

I can only hope that he can forgive us, as well.