January 1 （visa expires in 13 days）
“Babe?” Daniel saw me staring at my phone.
The surrounding noise seemed to have subsided. All my attention was focused on one short message that I had spent years waiting for.
“What’s up?”
I handed him the phone and translated the message.
“Oh my god! Is it really her?”
I nodded, and he looked at it again.
“I wonder which of my followers is her friend. Are you going to reply?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know what to say. “I’m going home.”
“Hang on. We’ll all come with you.”
“No. You should stay. Really. I need some alone time.” I stood up and headed for the exit.
I’d only gone a few steps when a familiar hand touched my shoulder and pulled me back into a warmhearted hug.
“Keep me posted. You don’t have to go through this alone. I’m here for you, okay?”
I nodded into his chest, and he let me go.
We exchanged a tight smile and walked in opposite directions.
I had to make a decision about something that had been a major issue in my life since long before I got to Thailand and met Daniel or Keren – and I needed to do it alone.
I went home, undressed and climbed into bed.
I read the message from my mother again.
I tapped the picture to look at her profile, but there were no images.
Maybe she had set up an Instagram account just to contact me.
How could I be sure it was her? Maybe someone was messing with me.
It didn’t seem like something my father would do, but I had to be sure.
“Yes. I have to call her,” I told myself aloud, to summon courage.
In her time zone, wherever she is, it’s probably still last year, I thought.
Weird. On a symbolic level, it felt like I was about to make a phone call to my past. My relationship with my mother had been frozen in place for many years; I’d been through so much that she knew nothing about.
I had changed so much; I wasn’t the same person that she knew before.
How could one phone call merge my past and present selves?
I stared at the green call button on the screen. All I had to do was tap it.
I stayed like that, frozen, until it started to get light outside.
It took everything in me to tap that green button.
I did it fast, so I didn’t have time to back out.
It was like bungee jumping off a bridge (not that I had any first-hand experience of that).
It rang. No answer. I decided to count five more rings and then hang up.
I was relieved but also let down because it had taken so much courage to even try.
It rang five more times, and I was about to hang up when a voice I had not heard for many years said hello.