“Let’s just get Pad Thai,” Matt says. He pushes the menu aside.

“Yeah? Is it good here?” Irene asks.

Matt gestures at the pop-up streetside restaurant in the Silom district of Bangkok. “It’s a Thai dish in Thailand, it’s probably good everywhere.” Recently back from his near week-long jaunt up to Chiang Mai, he’s already a self-appointed expert on the country, despite it only being his third week in Southeast Asia.

Irene nods at this answer and graces her dinner partner with a stunning smile. She’s in advertising, an unsurprising career choice given how attractive she is. Half Russian and half Chinese, she’s a ‘mixed race’, which is almost always a good looking combination.

“You know, my buddy Zack would be so jealous of me right now. Out to dinner with a cute half-Asian girl. He has a thing for Asian girls.”

She laughs. “And you don’t?”

“I don’t,” he admits, “but you’re really giving that preference a run for its money.”

Another brilliant smile.

He’d made a passing invitation in the hostel’s common room on his way out the door and before he knew it Irene was tagging along to find some dinner. On the walk to the restaurant through the lamplit night streets, Matt listened to her talk about ex-boyfriends (she’d been sure to press home that ‘former’ status) until he finished the origami dog he’d been folding. She’d stopped mid-sentence to jump in circles with excitement. After they’d picked out this restaurant, she’d leaned forward over the fold-out dinner table while he explained the plans for his trip–he’s going to his second country, Vietnam, in a few days. She’d had so many questions when he’d told her that, and been excited with his answers, playing with her hair as she asked. It was all going so well, better than many dates he’d been on. But he has a girlfriend now.

“It’s a shame I have a girlfriend, though. And happily so,” he adds hastily.

Irene’s smile freezes for only a second. “Well, I have a boyfriend.”

Matt laughs. “You’ve been talking about ex-boyfriends this whole time and never thought to mention your current one? Curious…” he teases.

“So is it serious? You and her? You said you’re going to be traveling for months.”

“Serious? I guess it is. I like her, we say ‘I love you’, we spend tons of time together and don’t get sick of each other; we just work well together. I’m the extrovert, I’ve always been the crazy guy, and Chelsea’s calmer and more by-the-book. We still have a lot in common, but without all the drama I used to have in past relationships. She’s much more stable and it took me some time to understand that that was what I wanted, but I’m glad I did. I’m twenty-seven now, I’m not interested in livin’ la vida loca.” But he will quote Ricky Martin until the day he dies.

“I know what you mean, I’m twenty-seven also. My current boyfriend is like your Chelsea. He’s more stable and I know he loves me, but… the twenties were fun! I’ve had boyfriends where we fight and scream and break-up and get back together and you feel so low and then so high. Don’t you miss it? The agony and the ecstasy?”

“No, not really. Though that does sound like a great band name.”

Irene half rolls her eyes. “Do you have a picture of her?”

“Do I have a picture!” He hands her his phone.

Irene flips through the ‘Chelsea’ album. “She is… I don’t know the word… likeable? She has a face that is very likeable.”

A wry grin. “I mean, I do like her face.”

“Oh, you know what I mean! How long have you two been apart?”

“Oh god, forever! I haven’t seen her since like, September!”

The young woman looks confused. “It’s… still September?”

Matt checks his watch: September 29th. “Oh. Uh, early September, so like, just four weeks now.”

* * *

“I’m not gonna be gone forever,” Matt says, hugging Chelsea.

They’re in a hotel room in New York City. It’s August 31, 2014 and tomorrow Chelsea goes home to DC and leaves her boyfriend to figure out the last minute details for his Asia trip.

“I know,” she blubbers and buries her face in his shoulder. The only times he’s seen her cry is when they’re talking about the future of their relationship or watching a particularly touching movie like About Time or A Winter’s Tale †.

“C’mon, you’re gonna make me cry too.” Too late.

They sit on the bed for a time, not saying anything. When they kiss, Matt can taste his tears, her tears, it doesn’t matter. “Well, you’ll see me in, what’d we figure, ten weeks?”

He’d agreed to keep his trip to five months if Chelsea would agree to come visit halfway through. Over the past few months he’d given up trying to convince her to come with him for the whole trip, to quit her job too, and to sell or put her stuff in storage and live out of a backpack with him. It didn’t make sense for her. The timing didn’t work out. Eventually he’d understood–

“I’m going to quit and come out with you!” she blurts, pushing away from him to look him square in the face. “I’ve decided that I’m gonna do it. I can’t come right away, it’ll take some time to get everything figured out, maybe December or January, but I always say I want to travel and there’s never going to be a good time and it’s only going to get harder to do it.”

Matt’s nodding, smiling. “You’re still coming out over Thanksgiving, right?”

“Of course!” She knocks him over with her hug-tackle.

* * *

Back from dinner, Irene and Matt go their separate ways once at Lub D Backpackers, Bangkok. She to skype with her friends, and he to hop on Gchat to see if Chelsea is able to plan the hotels and hostels for her ‘midterm visit’ in six weeks. They’re going to meet up in Cambodia and then do some South Thailand beaches–

“Hey, who was that hottie you were with?”

The question comes from another hostel-goer, standing by the door. He has a face that could pass for a younger Hugh Jackman if the Australian actor shaved his head and face down to a stubble and spoke slangly, in a way that seemed hungry and just on the point of some hustle.

It takes a second for Matt to process the question. “Her? Oh, you mean Irene. Yeah, she’s cute, but I have a girlfriend. We just met here like an hour ago.”

The man relaxes a bit, but tenses in a different way. “You think you can introduce me?”

“Uh, maybe you should introduce yourself?” Matt waits for the young man’s nod in agreement. “And she has a boyfriend, if that’s what you mean.”

“Ahhh,” the traveler nods and shakes his head, somehow at the same time, “Relationships are a fucking joke. I had a serious girlfriend for a while, but it fell apart after I figured out she was just interested in the money. All women just want the same thing: to be taken care of for now and then to find the next better thing.”

Matt laughs in his face. “You can’t be serious. I’m sure some women are like that, but that’s as true as like, some women saying ‘All guys want is sex’ or something. People are people.”

The man is adamant and goes into details of his failed relationship, of this women losing interest when he doesn’t pay for the check. The one time he doesn’t go in for it and she flips out and they end up breaking it off.

Ene (pronounced ‘En-oh’) as he introduces himself, says he has a game he plays on the strings of dates he goes on since the break-up. “After the check comes, I just let it sit, just let it sit there. I know I’m paying for it, why should it matter if I wait a minute or five minutes or ten minutes? But I wanna know what they do.” He taps his temple. “After a few minutes, are they gonna offer to pay? Are they gonna keep ignoring it? Are they–are they going to ask me when I’m going to pay the bill? And these are nice dinners, I’m no cheapskate, but I wanna know what they’re gonna do. If they offer to pay, ah, we have a keeper and I’ll tell her I got it, but you know? Not one of them has offered to pay.” He leans back against the hostel room’s poster-covered wall, satisfied.

“Come on, you’re joking.”

“I’m not! I’ve been on a dozen dates, at least, and they all keep breaking down like this. I’m at the point where I finally understand that relationships are just a simple business transaction. They want money and nice dinners and so on. And I want,” Ene lowers his voice, “I want sex. When they’re honest and upfront about it, we can have a real conversation. That’s all I’m asking for: for an honest conversation.”

Matt’s shaking his head. “I get it, but I don’t think all women are like that. I used to wonder why all the girls I was seeing had drama or we didn’t connect or whatever, but then I realized that it was me. I was attracting these women and unknowingly fending off the better ones. I had to change myself, what I was doing and how I was going about the whole dating thing and I would attract the right women. Have you considered that maybe you’ve just been attracting only these kinds of girls? Maybe there’s something you could be doing differently to start meeting the ones who want a real relationship? If that’s even what you want, I guess.”

“No way man, I’m telling you, I’ve seen it all and women are all the same. It’s just how long they take to reveal themselves.” Ene frowns and spreads his hands. “And I prefer the ones who are honest right up front.”

“I really think you’re just meeting the wrong kind of women. You said you were from Toronto, right? You should come visit me in a couple of months when I’m home, I’ll be in New York City then and I’m sure we can find you some women to restore your faith in the gender.”

“Ah, well, I wish I could come to the States.” Nervous fingers scrub at his roughened chin. “I was there once a few years ago, but I can’t come back now, not unless they change some policies. On like felonies and stuff.”

Standing behind Ene and witnessing the whole conversation unfold is Mike. Ene and Mike had been chatting by the common room door before the former had shifted his attention to Matt. It’s not an overly crowded common room and Matt had met Mike before his Pad Thai dinner with Irene. Mike’s a quiet guy from Chicago, except when you ask him about his travels. Then he’s eager as anyone to go into detail. He’s saved the money, left everything behind, and has been finding sublime freedom in exploring the world and the new experiences it’s provided. He shakes his head. It’s no surprise that this gentle fellow can’t find agreement with Ene’s ideology.

Matt looks over at the Chicagoan’s embarassed shrug. “Right on. The offer still stands if you can get it all sorted. In the meantime, I’m gonna go Gchat with my girlfriend now…”

Ten minutes later he has Chelsea on the instant messenger program, chatting and sifting through beach bungalow reviews.

Matt: Gah
Matt: We have to wait like six more weeks until you’re out here!
Chelsea: I know! I wish I could just be on the plane right now!

* * *

Six weeks later Matt looks up into the night sky. Somewhere up there Chelsea is in a plane racing towards him.

He’s alone on the roof of the Envoy Hostel in Phnom Penh, looking for the stars hidden behind a haze of light pollution from the erratically lit Cambodian capital city.

He turns around when a shuffling of feet and creaking of metal-in-cement lets him know someone else is coming up the stairs behind him.

“You mind if I smoke?” the motherly, middle-aged woman asks in an American accent and comes to stand next to him at the roof patio railing.

“Nah, go ahead.” Few of his friends back home smoke cigarettes, but out here, out with travelers it’s the norm for people to light up.

“Nah,” he says again when she offers him the pack. “I don’t smoke.”

Diane smiles to herself. “Not many of you kids do these days. Good for you! How old are you?”

He tells her.

“Ah, I liked my twenties,” sage nodding, “but I loved my thirties and forties.” She’s fifty-eight. “And my fifties are shaping up to be even better. But I remember being your age.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh sure, I’m not so old that I’m senile!” A playful half-shove. “It felt like the world was changing so fast. Kennedy got shot when I was a kid, right on TV. Everyone was so frightened and angry. And then the Cold War and Vietnam. We were protesting, sit-ins, the whole nine yards. Everything was changing so fast. But nowadays? Hoo!” She takes a drag, shaking her head and looking out onto the city. “Nowadays things change fast. I don’t mind, I’m used to it already, but it’s so much faster now.”

She sees Matt nodding politely, but a bit distracted. “Ah listen to me, I must be boring you.”

“No, no, not at all!” He looks pained. “I like hearing about it, but I came up here to think and I’m just thinking about my girlfriend, she’s coming out tomorrow. Less than twenty-four hours now–after waiting for over two months. It’s tough, being apart for so long.”

She agrees. “But if it’s good, it’ll all work out.”

He looks down at her hand and finds the wedding ring. “Were you ever apart from your husband–husband?” No reason to be heteronormative, but she nods so he keeps going. “For so long?”

“Ah, we spent our first anniversary on opposite sides of the globe, if you’d believe it. I was in Japan teaching, and he was back in the States.”

“That’s impressive.”

“Oh sure. And even after that, through the marriage, sometimes we didn’t see each other for more than a month or two total in any given year. We had so much we wanted to do and didn’t want to give it up or have the other give up their dreams. And it was tough sometimes, but it stayed strong and we kept it up and raised a family.” She raises some fingers. “Three girls, all about your age or older.”

They chat a bit longer, but eventually the cigarette burns down, and then the next, and Diane has to go inside and get some sleep. She has an early day with her husband to visit the temples and palaces and so on. “Now we have all the time in the world for each other.” She gives a smile and a farewell.

Matt turns back to the sky and the city. Diane had said that things change fast, but they can’t change fast enough for him right now. He checks the cheap Casio wristwatch he picked up on Amazon for the trip. It’s been holding up perfectly. The blocky black-on-green numbers read past midnight now, November 15. Today’s the day! Only twelve hours or so.

A year apart? That woman must be crazy! It’s been less than a quarter of that and he’s missed Chelsea tremendously. And then in two more weeks she goes home and he has to wait another two months for her to come out and travel ‘full-time’. That wait is something he certainly won’t find himself missing.

† Just kidding on A Winter’s Tale. Seriously, it has to be one of the the worst movies ever made. But maybe if it was a drinking game…?

Chelsea and Matt, all dolled up for a wedding and the last time he shaved before his trip.

Chelsea and Matt again, this time in Phnom Penh. Three months of no shaving.

One of the hundreds of vendors lining streets and alleys, selling things from fish to vegetables to knock-off goods to TV remotes.

Also common in Southeast Asia, huge fucking prawns grilled and served with their shells and heads still on.