DECEMBER–JANUARY
I stood frozen on the sidewalk, mesmerized by how the concrete was studded with ice like diamonds and bordered by fir trees dressed in Christmas lights. On the streets, traffic adhered to perfect order: cars heading in the same direction all stayed in one lane rather than swerving into the opposite to avoid wandering cows or wayward rickshaws.
I hadn’t expected to feel such awe earlier that day when I’d swiped my debit card at one of the many ATM machines lining Huntington Avenue. Without a glitch, it spit out a pile of crisp twenty-dollar bills, the familiar image of Andrew Jackson with his bouffant hair falling neatly into my hands. Between Indian rupees, Brazilian reals, Peruvian soles, and Kenyan shillings, I’d started to feel like I was playing with Monopoly money. It was comforting to be back in my homeland with mainstays such as baseball, cranberry sauce, and working traffic lights. And when I’d ducked into a deli that morning to order coffee with a splash of milk, that’s exactly what I’d gotten—no need to flip through a pocket language guide first. I’d forgotten how easy life could be.
But I worried that other, more important things wouldn’t slip back on as easily as a pair of well-worn mittens. The crunch of boots over snow on the sidewalk behind me broke into my thoughts and sent me hiding from my pursuer, and I flattened my body inside the doorway of a wine shop. Now I was on the run. I only hoped that I’d moved fast enough to lose the man close on my tail and remain undetected.
Crunch, crunch, crunch. The footsteps were almost upon me. My entire body shook and I held my breath, trying unsuccessfully to suppress the laughter threatening to explode from my lungs. I pressed my hands against my mouth to hold it in, and woolly fuzzies from my gloves stuck to my peppermint-flavored lip balm.
Crunch, crunch, crunch. A shadow from the awning overhead fell across my face, and I could see that it was a couple, not the curly-haired man I’d been running from, who passed me by. They were bundled in fluffy scarves and earmuffs, the woman’s arm linked through the man’s in order to keep her from slipping on the ice.
I stuck out my head, craning my neck to look down the block. In the same instant, Elan’s face materialized from behind the shield of another doorway twenty yards down, and his eyes locked on mine. I snapped my head back, but it was too late. The laughter I’d been trying so hard to contain erupted, and I was left gasping for breath and holding my sides. The tears that spilled from my eyes began to form icicles in my lashes.
In the span of a few seconds, Elan sprinted down the block and pounced on my giggling, bent-over form in the doorway. He wrapped his arms around my waist, twirling me on the sidewalk until the lights and the trees and the shoppers and the snowflakes all melted into a wash of color. The couple in front of us stopped to stare, smiling. A few others also turned to see what the commotion was about: Just two people in love, acting like giddy children, playing hide-and-seek in darkened doorways.
As Elan put me down, his arm secured around my waist, I stood on my tiptoes to kiss his cheek; his cold, smooth skin made my lips tingle. I wanted to stay inside that protected snowy world, but sadness clouded my happy moment. Soon I’d be back in the blistering heat, exploring ancient ruins straight out of an Indiana Jones movie, while he’d be meeting with his agent and going on countless auditions. These little moments could be perfect, but the big picture was flawed. The dichotomy of our lives was driving us apart. E-mail and Skype were no substitution for a relationship, and the divide between Elan and me had grown deeper than distance alone.
After graduating from yoga school and spending a few days celebrating with Chloe and Marta on the beaches of Kovalam—indulging in ayurvedic massages and scarfing down any dish made with onions or garlic—I’d flown from Bangalore to spend the holidays in Boston, where Elan had gotten a role in a Chekhov play.
While part of me felt that returning home was cheating on my year abroad, the other part knew I’d be cheating only myself if I didn’t make an effort to see Elan again—to lie beside him, breathe him in, and listen to him tell me about his day. And when my parents offered to split the price of a plane ticket between them as my Christmas present, I considered the decision made.
Standing here, wrapped in Elan’s arms, I couldn’t help but think about the old question “Can you go home again?” Home, I now knew, for me wasn’t a place. It was with the people who mattered most.
But if people change, does that mean home is never permanent either?
I’d been pretending that the space between Elan and me didn’t exist. I pretended that the evenings spent sipping mulled wine in candlelit cafés and kissing in the streets meant that time and distance couldn’t diminish our love. I tried to believe that falling asleep with my head on his chest to the rhythm of his heartbeat was the way it was always supposed to be.
But while I’d been exploring the world, Elan had turned into a poster child for the term “struggling actor”—eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; waiting tables after auditioning all day; pooling loose change from the glass jars on top of our refrigerator to just barely make the rent. So if I sensed a bit of resentment, I figured I’d deserved it. If he couldn’t come visit me during my year abroad, well, I was the one who’d left.
So many times during my visit, I found myself wondering: Was leaving wrong? Would remaining have been more wrong? I worried that staying in perpetual motion would keep me from finding answers that I was seeking—hadn’t I just learned at the ashram that the truth is more likely to reveal itself in stillness?
I couldn’t make that decision for my entire future, but I knew what I wanted right now. In the middle of that icy sidewalk, I grabbed Elan’s hand, pulling him to a stop midstride. I buried my head in his chest and simply stood still.
A few days, a couple long flights, and a lonely layover in Bangalore later, I finally arrived in Bangkok to be reunited with Jen and Amanda. We’d been apart for more than a month. Deep down, I think they were a little surprised (and relieved) that I hadn’t stayed back in the States.
“We were worried you wouldn’t want to come back after seeing Elan!” Jen joked when I rejoined them at Big John’s hostel.
Glancing at their faces as they poked their heads out of their bunks—faces I now knew as well as my own—I also understood just how dedicated you had to be to travel with two other people for a year of your life. In some ways, this trip required just as much commitment as my long-term relationship. It meant doing what I said I was going to do. It meant sticking with them even when a place lost its luster, even when we didn’t agree, even when we felt like screaming. The second I walked into our tiny, windowless triple and felt relief at seeing their smiles again, I knew that my home, at least for now, was on the road, with Jen and Amanda.
As usual, the three of us had more time than money to spare, so we boarded a bus rather than a plane to make the five-hour journey from Bangkok to Cambodia. Apparently, taking the cheap route was going to cost us.
“I have an entire page with room for the stamp!” Jen said, stating the obvious to the Cambodian border patrol officer. He returned her passport unmarked after flipping through it and pausing with raised brows at the hodgepodge of stamps. From an outline of Machu Picchu to a rectangle containing the words “Good for Journey to Kenya,” multicolored ink blots tattooed most of her pages—except for the last one. Jen kept her finger planted in the spine of the little blue book, holding it open to the empty page, which just beckoned for a fresh splash of ink.
“No, cannot stamp last page.” The officer adamantly shook his head. The logic of this eluded us: if there was physically room for the Cambodian visa stamp, why couldn’t he just use the free space?
Amanda and I stood guard on either side of Jen. Both of us had two blank pages left—the result of more efficient (or overlapping) stamping techniques used by officials at Brazilian customs. “Man, I didn’t see anything about blank page quotas in the guidebook,” I said to the girls, fully aware that Jen might not be let i
nto the country at all. And that would mean, of course, that Amanda and I would be going back to Bangkok with her. Hoping an apologetic approach might work better, I turned to the officer and said, “Sohm to [I’m sorry]. What can we do?”
“Must get more passport pages in Thailand,” he said, unwavering. Dust coated our hair and sweat soaked our T-shirts. We’d been prepared to unload our backpacks from underneath the bus and lug them across the border to Poi Pet, one of Cambodia’s overland entry towns, but we hadn’t accounted for the possibility of enduring the bone-jostling, sports-bra-requiring, multihour trip back to Bangkok—if we could even find a bus to take us.
Amanda let her backpack drop to the ground with a thud and then sat on top of it. If we were ever going to get through Cambodian customs, it was obviously going to take a while. “But we’re so excited to see your beautiful country,” I tried again. After all, it was true.
“Okay, you pay,” said the officer, crossing his arms over his chest.
Though flattery might get you nowhere, bribery could get you anywhere—in this case, across the Cambodian border. Jen pulled a guidebook from the flimsy fabric purse she’d bartered for in India, opened it to the bookmarked section, “Useful Khmer Phrases,” and said, “Th’lai pohnmaan [How much]?”
“Ten dollar.”
“I have only three,” Jen said, slipping a trio of crisp greenbacks printed with George Washington’s face from her money belt. Knowing she was bluffing, I wondered if the officer would pull out the handcuffs, attempt to haggle, or simply turn us away.
He peered at the bills for a full minute, then folded them twice before tucking them into the pocket of his button-down shirt. He looked left and right and spoke in a low voice. “Okay, but must get more pages at embassy in Phnom Penh. And must write note for permission to stamp last page.”
He ripped a sheet of lined paper from a tattered notebook and slid it across the desk toward Jen. She grabbed a ballpoint and promptly penned a “Get out of Thailand (Nearly) Free” card:
Dear Cambodian Border Patrol,
I give the Cambodian government permission to stamp the last page of my passport.
Sincerely,
Jennifer Baggett
The officer took the signed permission slip and tossed it into a desk drawer, where it would probably be lost forever, before dismissing us with a wave of his hand.
“Awk koun! [Thank you!]” we said, all together. Then Jen and I helped Amanda slip on her backpack as automatically as if we were brushing a loose strand of hair from our own eyes. We didn’t say a word as we hefted the load onto Amanda’s shoulders, grateful that we had safely dodged yet another one of those random travel roadblocks we never saw coming.
With stamped passports in hand and the sun scorching our scalps, we moved deeper into a new land. Giddy that we’d successfully bribed a corrupt border official, I cheered us on as we crossed over the border. I’d come a long way since that morning in Brazil when I’d tried to separate from Jen and Amanda in the party dorms, when I’d worried that the whole trip would turn out to be one big happy hour.
Africa had humbled us, made us appreciate one another more, and strengthened our bonds after sleeping head to toe to escape a cockroach infestation. At no time had the strength of our friendship been clearer than when walking to a mall next to one of the world’s largest slums in Nairobi. We’d stopped our usual chattering abruptly as a deafening Bang! Bang! Bang! had shaken the ground beneath our feet.
Before we could figure out if the noise was gunshots, an explosion, or something else, the locals scattered like gazelles being hunted by a lion. Following the herd, the three of us took off running as women held babies close to their chests and men dropped their flip-flops so they could move faster. In the mass panic that ensued, the three of us separated at a fork in the road—Jen sprinting in a zigzag pattern (she said she figured it lessened the odds of being hit by a bullet) to the right and Amanda diving left, crouched low to the ground with her hands shielding her head (she reasoned the lower you are, the safer you are). I’d sprinted ahead to grab Amanda and direct her toward Jen. In that second, choosing right or left wasn’t an option—I had to pick both to make sure we were all together and no woman was left behind.
The danger turned out to be imagined. As our six feet slapped the pavement simultaneously, the Kenyans suddenly slowed to a stop and collectively let out a nervous laugh (“Only fireworks,” one young mother said with a weak grin as she removed a blanket from her baby’s head). As terrified as I’d been moments earlier, I was relieved to discover that my instinct under fire was to keep the group together.
Now, after more than a month apart, I’d made my way back to the group again and was surer than ever that we were all headed in the same direction. We’d been friends to start, but after good times and bad, our relationships with one another had deepened more than I’d ever expected. Sure, Jen and Amanda might have gotten into a screaming match or two over working on the road, and I’d had to step in to break it up. And maybe I’d escaped from conflicts a time or two by going for a run instead of hashing out exactly why I couldn’t spend one more second listening to Jen and Amanda debate how many fat grams were in a spring roll. By the time we’d (barely) made it over the Cambodian border, any romantic notions we’d harbored about our around-the-world vacation, or about one another, had long since been discarded by the roadside. In their place was a real, perfectly imperfect group of friends.
The woman knew she was going to die soon, but still she smiled. Her puffy eyes pierced mine from behind the glass-protected photograph at the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, one of hundreds of black-and-white faces staring out from the display case.
We’d arrived in Cambodia’s capital of Phnom Penh earlier that morning after a few days spent biking around the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat. I’d never before heard of Tuol Sleng but knew about the nearby Killing Fields from the famous movie of the same name. The city of Phnom Penh, which grew up around a Buddhist monastery, had been transformed into a gruesome site for mass murder in 1975 by the Communist Khmer Rouge party. The Khmer Rogue had ordered the city evacuated and used one of its high schools—renamed Tuol Sleng—as a prison/torture chamber for thousands of people. Today the city is very much alive, although a place of extremes. Thriving drug and prostitution rings can be found on one end and quaint riverside cafés on the other.
After checking into a hostel, we’d immediately hired a tuk-tuk to take us to the killing fields. Our driver, a soft-spoken, gentle man named Sok, expertly dodged the mayhem of pedestrians, cyclos, and cars zigzagging through the streets and handed us masks to help block the clouds of pollution threatening to choke us. Once we were outside the city limits, the world whizzed by in clips of green rice paddies, onyx-haired children splashing in puddles, and simple wooden shacks.
As we watched kids chasing one another near the roadside, it was almost possible to forget that war rather than peace had so recently prevailed across Cambodia. My high school world geography class covered little about the country, but I’d gotten a kind of CliffsNotes version of its history by reading through our guidebook. But visiting the area was teaching me more than any book or class ever could.
A weak country sandwiched between more powerful ones such as Thailand and Vietnam, Cambodia had been repeatedly invaded for decades by other nations hoping to strengthen their influence over the Indochinese peninsula, including Thailand, France, Japan, and Vietnam. Americans had ravaged the land with bombs during the Vietnam War. But all the conflicts and wars that Cambodia experienced paled in comparison to the bloodshed of 1975. The Khmer Rouge party had taken over, and its leader, Pol Pot, had ordered the murder of more than two million Cambodians.
When we arrived at the Killing Fields, an outdoor museum that had once been an orchard and an old Chinese cemetery, Sok waited patiently outside. After the Khmer Rouge had taken control of the country, the land had been converted into a mass execution center to exterminate “traitors” thought to be oppos
ed to the Khmer Rouge’s Communist agenda. Among those the Khmer Rouge had seen as a threat were doctors, professors, diplomats, and other educated people, as well as anyone who wore glasses.
After I waited my turn in line to light incense at a shrine in front of the memorial—a glass-enclosed stupa filled with about eight thousand human skulls—our guide recommended we head to the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide as soon as we got back to the city. That was the first I’d heard of the high school turned prison where Cambodians had been interrogated and tortured before being shipped off for execution. We knew it would be a lot for one day, but when we left the Killing Fields, we asked Sok to take us Tuol Sleng.
The museum was eerily silent as we wandered through classrooms converted into prison cells where captives had been locked to single beds with shackles. Bullet holes and bloodstains speckled the walls in ghoulish patterns.
After an hour, Amanda and Jen waited outside on a bench in the courtyard enclosed by a barbed-wire fence, but I couldn’t stop myself from staying longer to look at every single one of the victims’ photos on display in an act of remembrance. The Khmer Rouge had used the pictures, along with recorded biographies, to prove they’d captured their “enemies.” Now these documents serve as a reminder of the atrocities inflicted by man. As I walked past the pictures, I examined each and every face. Every so often, I would come across a captive who stared boldly into the lens and smiled ever so slightly at the camera.
If these people realized they were about to be tortured, raped, or murdered, how and why did they smile? I can never presume to know what they were thinking or feeling, of course, but staring into their rebellious eyes, I imagined them saying “You can take my clothes, take my home, take my life. But there is nothing you can do that will ever break my spirit.” Their smiles struck me as a final act of defiance, a legacy to those still living, proving that we all have a part of ourselves that no one can ever steal.
The Lost Girls: Three Friends. Four Continents. One Unconventional Detour Around the World. Page 35
