Tammy T. Stone
The World of Away
(Thailand)
Walking to yoga class yesterday, we noticed that the horizon had disappeared. There was water and there was sky and no line between, like there had been the day before.
A boat hovered in the distance and the sun was bright but invisible. Both sky and sea were a shade of phosphorescent blue reminding me of four old prints of Old Quebec hanging in my parents’ basement in the home of my adolescence, the one with the large brown circular bar, snooker table and hot tub we never used so that it became filled with stuff, and eventually, my stuff, the remnants of seven years of apartment-living in Toronto.
My parents agreed to take the stuff. They didn’t expect me to leave and not come back (yet). How do I explain to them that one horizon-less day (and quirky, magical things like this happen almost every day – makes years of travel make sense?
Not that I was looking for sense, or magic, even.
I just started by coming away, and I fell in love, and I continued. I always liked being away, though.
Even when I lived in Toronto, I would love to go to new cafes in unknown (to me) neighbourhoods and more or less pretend I was living another life somewhere else. Everything felt better with this filter – I wasn’t trying to get away from myself, I don’t think, anyway. I loved being with myself, in my body, just experiencing the world of Away. I didn’t want to be someone else. I think this is why my wishes came true. Wishes can’t come true for you if you don’t want to, or resist being you, because then who’s left to receive the wishes fulfilled?
I wanted to continue, as me, but I wanted the backdrop to change. I wanted, without knowing it, to be in the position of seeing a horizon-less sky in a Southern island of a country grown so dear from me, so far from my origins.
And to take a ferry to the island that was donated from or sold to Thailand by Japan, who used it in the 80s, with pink and purple round Formica tables, which made me feel I was on the Love Boat – this reminded me about the show; I YouTubed the theme song later and got swept away, again someplace else.
Again as myself.
And when the horizon-less sky disappears it’s only a matter of time before the clouds gather and the rains come, because it’s the season.
I love rain. It brings the world together. So now I’m tucked away on my balcony, writing on a wooden table looking at bamboo trees, and our new cat for the month has squeezed between me and the back of the chair, and suddenly I could be back in Toronto on a rainy day in some new cafe, sipping tea, imagining all the lives yet to come.
In the meantime, I have tomorrow, when the horizon, after the haze, will probably be back.
There's No War in World 