Having a home again
Well, this seems like something to write about so I will. I’m pretty excited to have found A or she found me or whatever. We spend a fair amount of time together but up until now lived apart. Yesterday she went out apartment hunting for us and found a place for $180 a month with a pool and on the ground floor. The road is paved and there is security fencing. The apartment is smaller and she shot video of the place and shared on WhatsApp. I could not really go to see the apartment or the cost would have gone up maybe $50 a month or so because of the so called double standard for barang. Barang is any foreigner. Yeah. Like me. So I sent A because she speaks the language and is easy for her to find things. She found our place almost right away. Fully furnished, free wifi, pool, even a balcony area. Pool is the nicest!
What it really means is that my days of hopping around to different airbnb are done. She also let me know we would be eating at home most of the time and she would be doing healthy food choices for us. We did agree to have a meal out once a week and go out for coffee at the river since I really enjoy doing that. The final result of this is the word home. A thing I have not had really for some years or almost a decade. I’ve just gone as I pleased.
So it is like a basic change in life for both of us. It is rather exciting to have found someone that can make a home for us and that really is looking forward to just daily life together. We had to take care of a few things before. Her daughter had to relocate to Phnom Penh for school for a year so I paid for her school costs for a year. I also had to pay the rental payment first and last month.
Now we are set but funny enough now we go to Kampot and Kep right in the middle of it all. She is gonna move in first and I’ll move after we get back. I have until 25 February here and I intend on staying until about then.
And then there are the unspoken and unwritten things. The harder things to just put down on paper. The feelings about having someone to care for again. To give some loving to. To laugh and cry with. Khmer people are very affectionate and loving people. It is easy to find all the deeper emotions and A tends to show them every so often openly. There are always deeper currents of life things that occur to me with all this. Like the sensation of just having another person right there. Sleeping with me, talking about our daughters, drinking a beer or coffee. She’s older too so there’s an unspoken comfort thing with that as well. Some older expats have much younger so-called “girlfriends”. I am not sure what their relationships are like or how deeply things run. One friend David told me not to expect love or affection. His deal sounds more like a mutually agreed business deal. A loves the physical part of things and the touching and sharing. For me, that was something that ran so deep but yet was so profoundly missed at times. I had felt my ex-wife ruined me with women but it turns out she never reckoned with Cambodia.
Finally today home feels like around the corner. A few little things to do. Kick some can down the road. Find the warm place to stop with these words.
Like right here.