2.
I never used to wake up early. Not by choice, at least. It’s something I only picked up after I first came here.
I figured out pretty quickly that if I wanted to get any outdoor time without having to slather myself in sunscreen, I had to build my day around being awake and ready before the heat really set in.
This close to the equator, you’ve got dangerous UV from late morning until mid-afternoon.
The light has a quality to it that’s different from anywhere else I’ve lived—harsher, flatter, almost white at its peak.
And that’s just the sun. The heat is something else.
Now I rise just before the sun with no alarm, roll out of bed and make myself an iced coffee.
Always iced. That’s essential. I use a French press and pour it straight over a glass packed tight with ice, a trick I picked up from the women at the little noodle stall on the corner who’ve been doing it that way their whole lives.
Besides being more refreshing, I can drink it fast and get the caffeine running through the system by the time I hit the beach.
I don’t go every morning. I alternate every other day. On days I don’t run, I stay home and lift weights and watch the waves crashing below me. Pretty simple system. Today’s a running day, which means it’s time for beach cleanup too.
I arrive just as the sunrise is cresting the eastern hills.
Kamala is a sunset beach, which means the mountains and the treeline along the shore help keep the sun from your eyes in the morning, everything still in a kind of grey-gold half-light that makes the sand look silver.
I park the bike in the public park just across the street from where I dropped Thalia off.
I get the orange rubber kitchen gloves and the roll of black garbage bags out of the storage compartment under the seat.
There’s a fresh crop of plastic junk that’s come in with the tide.
Toothbrushes, plastic toys, water bottles, detergent bottles, coffee cups, flip flops.
It’s the flip flops that get me. Tourists kick off their shoes, leave their stuff in the sand without ever noticing that the tide is rising.
Then, when the water gets high enough to drag their things away in the undertow, they lose them forever.
How do they miss this? Do they walk home without even realizing they’re not wearing shoes?
I guess when a replacement pair costs seven dollars you can afford to be careless.
It all ends up back on shore eventually, which means it ends up in my sack sooner or later.
I hurl it over my back like Santa, bending down to grab a bottle cap here, a piece of styrofoam takeout container there.
I’m not the only one doing this. At least, I don’t handle the whole beach myself.
Volunteers, both Thais and foreigners, get together and work in teams a couple of days a week.
The rest is handled by workers the hotels hire.
They’re dressed for the sun even before they need to be, with sunhats and cowls that leave just their faces visible.
The faces have smiles on them, most of the time.
A monk in his orange robes gives me a thumbs up as he makes his early morning rounds, his bare feet finding the dry sand above the tideline without him needing to look down. I’m a good foreigner, their smiles seem to say. I’ve earned the right to stick around.
I think about Thalia and wonder whether she’s up yet.
Probably not. Almost certainly not, and I don’t blame her.
I was the same way when I was her age. The gap year version of me slept until noon, moved only under the pressure of checkout times, ate street food at two in the afternoon and called it breakfast. I wonder if she considered the age gap between us when we met.
When she wakes up, whenever that will be, will she think of me?
Probably not much. Not that it would make much of a difference even if she did.
I’ve been here a year in the Land of Smiles. Sex is like fast food here. No, not exactly. It’s more brazen than that. Ronald McDonald doesn’t stand outside the restaurant in seven-inch heels and a tight little skirt trying to grab your arm and pull you inside. That’s every night on Bangla Road.
I knew when I moved here that I didn’t want to be part of that scene.
It’s not like I disapprove of it. It’s just not me, especially not since what happened.
I’m not unique. Everyone who comes here is escaping something.
For a lot of us guys, it’s bad marriages, relationships that didn’t work out.
A lot of us leave home and come here to forget a woman.
If I’m unusual it’s because I’m trying to forget two of them.
Thalia. Would she help me forget, or force me to remember when that’s the last thing I want to do?
Doesn’t matter, I guess, because the opportunity passed.
I let it go. There was something flirty in the way she acted last night, I’m sure of it.
The way she tested the smile, not sure it would land.
The way she said maybe longer like it was a question she was leaving for me to answer.
I could have chased after her. But then, that’s the whole thing all over again.
I can’t keep myself together, keep up this good balance I’ve been striking and also chase every girl that crosses my path.
I’m getting better. I have to remember that.
I fill up my bag and carry it back over the footbridge that runs across the little creek dividing the two sections of the beach.
I toss the bag in the big dumpster at the far end, put the gloves and bags back in the bike, and walk to the beach to stretch.
The sun’s already crept over the hills by the time I’m ready to go.
Just once down and back. I wave and nod to the regulars; the dog walkers, the older Thai couple who power-walk in matching tracksuits and have never once acknowledged me back but receive my wave with great dignity, the guy with the metal detector who’s been working the same stretch of sand since before I arrived and seems to find nothing, ever, but keeps coming back.
I don’t know them and they don’t know me, but we’ve been playing this little game of acknowledgment since the first few weeks I got here.
I’m sweating when I’m done. I rinse my bare feet in the big basin that a little old lady fills up every morning, set at the top of the footpath between the sand and the street.
She’s there every time, sitting on a low plastic stool with a thermos of tea and a phone she watches soap operas on, and she gives the same slow nod to everyone who uses the basin, a nod that doesn’t quite mean you’re welcome but means something like it.
It’s a kind thing to do, but it’s also practical.
The footpath gets sandy when people don’t clean their feet before they cross.
I hold my heel out and let the sand fall back into the creek to be carried out to sea.
I need a shower, but there’s one thing I want to do first. I buy some cat food at the 7-Eleven, the wet food, not the dry, and then drive up the beach road past the public school to the wat.
The road narrows up here, more trees, the temple wall running along the left side, white plaster with a terracotta cap, cracked in places and patched and cracked again.
Buddhist temples are a refuge for all kinds of animals.
In Thailand, it’s a crime to kill a cat or a dog.
That’s nice, especially because they’re sometimes eaten in neighboring countries.
But it means the shelters here are usually overflowing.
Somebody’s got to pick up the slack. The monks handle this, which is why the strays know to come to the wat.
And since I come to the wat to feed them, those little opportunists are always on the lookout for me.
They’re already yowling before I even stop the bike.
I have to brake hard to keep from running over the old calico with only one eye.
Damn it, Rusty. Don’t you have any sense of self-preservation?
She’s been here longer than any of the others, a permanent fixture on the flat stones in front of the temple entrance, stained with years of incense ash and the pawprints of animals that have been coming here longer than I have.
I put the kickstand down and pour a generous helping out.
A young ginger tom I haven’t seen before is already shouldering in, no manners at all. They scramble to hoover it all up.
An older monk—different from the one I saw on the beach this morning—watches all of this with passive indifference and then goes back to sweeping leaves with a thatch broom. I get back on the bike and ride home.
Now that the cats have had their breakfast, I can have mine. I make a right at the end of the beach road and I’m back on Millionaire’s Mile.
I shower, then make eggs and slice up a mango.
Coconut water, leftover watermelon, bagels and cream cheese.
The last are the real luxuries here, the kind of thing I can only get at the fancy foreigner market on the main road, where expats pay twice the going rate for the comfort of familiar packaging.
I love Thai food but I haven’t figured out how to eat rice first thing in the morning.
Maybe once I’ve been here long enough I will.
I eat out on the terrace, the sea already turning from grey to blue below me, a longtail boat cutting across the bay far out, its engine a faint clatter in all that quiet.