finding my way

Lately in this little adventure of one, I’ve felt curious I guess about things back in California. It has seemed so long yet really only 4 years and some months that I was back. I left in 2022 after 3 days and following a year in Mexico. To tell the truth I almost just stayed. I loved Mexico but really it was Merida. There was just something about the city and the Yucatán and just the whole thing. I would have likely been able to go do a visa run and come back for another six months. Or maybe I would have gone to La Paz. I liked it there too. I enjoyed puerto Vallarta but I don’t think I’d go back. Other points south had called me too. I was tempted to just go for a year and do a few places like Panama, Costa Rica and Belize. With no real plan. No sense of “next”. I don’t like the next questions.

At some point I felt I was done. I wanted Southeast Asia again. It was not Cambodia specifically. If you have read here you know likely it was another country I pined for. I was addicted to Vietnam. I admit it. I still am. I don’t know why ^[1].

So I walked and lost and found several trains of thought. Some very fractured memories of times in California with my daughter. When we would talk and she would need help with a thing or other. I think the divorce then acted upon all of us but for her maybe she felt she needed to make a choice of parents. I never did put that on her. What I settled for was one day a week dad duty. I would pick her up on Saturday and take her for coffee and then a meal out. Other times we would go longer. Maybe a weekend away somewhere she wanted or a place I wished to take her. Monterey Bay Aquarium or take Highway One north of San Francisco up toward Fort Bragg. I have photos of those things. It just seemed then we had reached some kind of balance. It never was perfect so perhaps finding balance really never is equal. Things are off just a little but not enough to register on a life scale.

This went on for years. Finally she had decided to move with her then boyfriend to Florida. Bad life choices. Bad people choices. She suffered and he took the car I gave her. She had to be rescued by her mom. I had left by then. There was no way I could be some kind of limited parent and I had waited since my year in Singapore and the regular trips to India to find my next steps. It turned out then it was Asia again. There was something about Southeast Asia that held me close. I felt wanted there. I met a person in Saigon that mattered at one time. We had some kind of little life together until during the pandemic the proverbial shit hit the fan with changes to visa extensions and I had to go. This hurt her because she had asked me to stay at this beach town she worked at. She did not know immigration and visas and constraints and pandemics. She only knew what she had and wanted. I guess like most of us.

Then time fractured again and I would come back and leave and come back which gets us to a point in 2022 for three days. I saw my daughter for some beer and food almost my last day. I knew then I would not go back. I had looked at California and could not see a thing that remained that held me.

when people move on

No one ever stays the same and I knew by 2023 there was no way I would go back. I had not met my wife yet but I had gone back to Vietnam and I just knew I could not leave again. This part of the world just held me close. Then like most things, family fractures on things said or not. My ex wife had this habit of copying and pasting things from social media and sending it along to another. Somehow someone read this in some social media algorithm. I don’t belong to any of the usual sites like facebook or TikTok or instagram. Those have been gone years. So where was it I posted this. Who knows.

I was told I had changed my beliefs about relationships or that I made bad life choices with my wife. None of this really made sense but everything declined to a point of what I would call estrangement.

I’m not an isolated case. Relationships from back there seem to fall apart often. Call it distance. Call it change. Whatever does this leaves us here with a life so very different. Them back wherever with some other life. The two never do meet. The distance is great from shore to shore but even greater from soul here to spirit there.

Which takes me to now I guess. Now when I remember old photos and papers which probably no longer exist. Photos of my mentor RWR in the desert doing archeology. Pictures of my mom and dad. Things. I had let them go before voluntarily. It seemed like it was then and I was now.

I still do. There’s no way to reboot yesterday and make a thing different that already happened. My wife here is fond of saying,

that was yesterday and today is today. Tomorrow hasn’t happened yet.

So it brings me on some weird circle to looking at California for some reason. I could go back easily. I could look at what happened yesterday and decide it was time to set things right. Would it even work? Doubtful.

All the things happened. So there is no changing them. Even with good intentions, I would probably pave my own way to Hell. As my mom would call the whole thing,

my personal Hell on earth.

So now I look backwards like perhaps every expat does at some point. I write on it. Feel it. But today I will go out for a bit and look again at things. There is no going backwards. No finding a thing and fixing it. All the things happened.

California is far away in time and space. It belongs there. In a world other people created and then damned. I’ve known that this life in Cambodia is the one since 2022. So while I can look back and see things through some lens, it’s not a clear vision. The rear view mirror is tinted. The look of things seems clouded.

The easiest thing now to go drink some beer and eat downtown. Find a thing or two and watch them slide by. Meanwhile I do have a photo for you of nothing in particular to do with this thing.

Maybe all the things are linked. Some photo of some life where I went and did a thing. Another life where others did. What I’ve learned is both exist in their places. Crossover cannot happen from a then to a now. I’ll take now.

☕️☕️ 7 min read

• lost
• found