Vang Vieng - Somewhere in Northern Thailand

Man by a Bus
Okay, details are still hazy. For the past thirty minutes I've been forensically trying to reconstruct my journey between Vang Vieng and Bangkok--in other words, I've been googling a lot. The sole line I've got to go on is: "Travelled from Vang Vieng to Bangkok, hooked up with an English lass named Melanie."

The only thing I know for certain is that when I say hooked up I don't mean any exchange of saliva. It was a purely platonic relationship that lasted less than twenty-four hours. I see glimpses of the day but they don't connect together. I feel like I'm trying to look at a whole piece of artwork by examining tiny details of the piece. It's frustrating as hell--I mean, that was a whole day and I have near zero recollection of it.

A Restaurant with a View
What I do remember are very brief moments: guarding bags at Vientiane's crowded bus station; walking around a duty-free warehouse stacked with cigarettes, alcohol, and perfume; eating lunch with Melanie in a deserted restaurant that overlooked the Mekong in Nong Khai; killing time at the station waiting for the night-train to depart. They feel like scenes from a David Lynch film--logically incoherent with a strange or soundless audio overlayed.

Killing Time
Maybe I'm stitching together moments from different days, different years. It's a scary thought considering the fallibility of memory. And it's not just a long-term thing. Different observers recollections of the same event an hour before are notoriously diverse. It pays to remember we're never objective observers when we recall the past. We bring a lot of baggage with us--our psychological frameworks, our neuroses, our emotional states. What we notice says more about ourselves than the events. Keeping a diary is a great way of reminding yourself about this. It helps to make you more than just this bundle of impulses and rationales at the particular time in question. It helps to avoid self-deception that can allow a person to keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

So, I say this: get in touch with your younger self and reflect on who you were and who you are now. Have you changed? Have you confronted your demons? Do you know why the things that happened in your life happened? Life is unique, don't get stuck on a railroad loop.