AN OPEN LETTER TO THE BOY I FELL IN LOVE WITH ABROAD

By Emma Patet

We didn’t call it love. That would have been too scary, made things too real. We were just two strangers from opposite ends of the same country, crossing paths in a foreign utopia.

How naturally we fell in love with the land around us — the places and people we experienced together yet in our own special, intimate ways. And how naturally we fell in love with each other, our only care the weight of our backpacks as we hopped flight to flight, destination to destination.

Memories remind us of days spent pretending our time was infinite, the knot in our stomachs that reminded us it was not twisting tighter and tighter. Ignoring the inevitable in favor of the bliss we felt in each of those moments — the moments when the fruit was too sweet and the sun too warm to believe it wouldn’t last forever.

How lucky we are to have explored the world as a pair. To have navigated a chaotic new blend of sights, colors and sounds that never quite felt real. To have dodged traffic in the streets of Hanoi and trekked through Erawan Falls in the pouring rain. How unfair it feels now, to only have the fading tan, the crinkled photographs, the ticket stubs and postcards. Little pieces of evidence that this short intermission in our otherwise unconnected lives was real.

It seems a cruel joke for the universe to play—crossing our paths only for them to quickly diverge. Whether I bump into you at a bar in New York or a museum in Europe, we will never get another night bumbling around Khao San Road.

We never slowed down enough to realize that time was moving too fast. That the “far off” end was growing nearer and more real each time we watched that bright orange glow dip below the horizon.

We’ll soon forget the scent of our favorite curry and the sound of each other’s laugh accompanying our brutally accented Thai. The way our hair looked after dodging traffic on the back of a motorcycle and the coolness of the early morning breeze as you offered a quick, detached hug as your final goodbye.

Four months, three countries, two one-way flights bound for two familiar homes.

The sun will keep setting over our little town in Thailand. The same pink clouds will pepper the sky even if we’re not there to acknowledge their beauty each night. We’ll travel new places and meet new people, scattering little pieces of our hearts along the way. But we’ll always have those four sacred months and that special little pocket of the world that will forever remain exclusively ours.

Until next time,