Memory lane

Tread. Retread. Retracing time. Stepping back into a place that I shall never return to again.

A small soi (lane) called Kasem San in Bangkok is where I stayed last week with my Dad, his girlfriend, my grandma and my son. The same soi that I lived at 10 years ago.

Memories flood through me, floor me, stirring up waves of melancholy for moments slipped by. How I lingered over my iced coffees at the shiny red street stall tables. How I walked with purpose towards the taxi cabs glinting in the morning sun. Those nights, those long, balmy nights nursing sweating beer bottles under the restaurant's fairy lights, in breathless and important conversations that now escape me.

The precise moment I knew I was in love, for the first time, was on this soi, when passing the A-One guesthouse on my way home. I'd had a fight, my first fight, with my boyfriend; a result of cultural confusion on the boundaries between men and women friends.

Emotion shifted suddenly from anger to panic. I did not want to lose this man. I could not imagine life without this man. I knew it then. Love. The word instantly, unexpectedly congealed in my head. Love. The love of my life, he was, is and will always be.

Retracing time. Time shifts.

This time, the time is compressed and quick as a rabbit. I feel I'm grabbing at time, chasing time. Streams of talk in the restaurant under the fairy lights are broken time and time again by the need to feed, restrain and console a cranky toddler, who squirms and squeals and shouts at the indignity of being stopped from snatching the mosquito coil smoldering under the table.

The shiny red table of the coffee stand is sticky with iced Ovaltine, which bubbles over and spills after my wee one discovers the joy of blowing through a straw. No lingering, only struggle to keep the glass upright, to prevent a toddler toddling onto the road, to finish the Ovaltine and wipe the table and prevent my hair from being used as a napkin by a grasping baby's hands.

I stroll the soi with my grandma, my dad, holding my baby, pointing out the places I stayed in, lingered at, in another time. The footsteps are marked by age and responsibility and the overwhelming burden of time, fleeting time.

I'll never get back that freshness of first love, I think.

I look at my grandma, my dad, my son. I weigh in. No time to linger, but a tiny thought sneaks in, later, upon reflection. Love. Rich and wide and deep. Shifting and expanding. I know it now. The loves of my life.

The girl lingering at the shiny red table has melted away, changed form, like the ice in her coffee. That time is gone. But not forgotten.

Life goes on, on this soi with the name that I never, ever pronounced correctly because I always mangled the tone.