(Picture 1 - Meaw tries to make sense of what I just said to her)
I am glad to see the family again and I really did need to return to Britain, for a couple of months (for reasons that will be explained in later blogs)... but aside from necessities and niceties, I am not glad to be back in England. Only my remaining shreds of rational thoughts and the sage and steady advice of my Mum and Dad - ok, can I get a rent reduction now that you made me say that? - are stopping me from jumping back on a plane headed Chiang Mai way.
To make matters worse, Meaw is having trouble contacting me since I returned*, due to her limited understanding of emailing and the internet (she's in the process of being taught...) and I cannot reach her in any way besides the internet. Our mobiles are too far from each other. I may have given her the wrong number for my home phone (though I have given it - the definite correct one this time - again in email).
I am stressed. I am exhausted. I am jet-lagged. I am lonely. I have a pounding headache and persistent loss of equilibrium, caused - I hope - by the aforementioned jet-lagged or possibly my medication. And I also have to find a job as soon as possible to make as much money as possible in the next two and a half months (once again, for reasons to be stated later).
So, to cheer myself up - or possibly make me even more frantic and antsy - I choose to relive the past month, sharing with you the trials, tribulations and triumphs that led me to drop off the blog map and find bliss in the arms of a girl named Meaw.(Picture 2 - Meaw eats probably the slimiest, grossest fruit in existence; it was like peeling eyeballs. Needless to say, I did not like them!)
As has been mentioned before, I had planned on staying in Chiang Mai only for a few days, to say that I had visited the city that gets such rave reviews from other backpackers (though I was hardly a backpacker now.. but also something not quite a tourist too) before zipping back down to Koh Samui and Oh.
Yet as each day passed, so Meaw and I became increasingly close.Chat. Chat. Chat. Chat. That is what Meaw and I tend to do most (or, at least, that is what we do most, in a blog suitable for my family members to read). Her idiosyncratic and wholly endearing English - which she is still working hard to be fluent in; Oh is more proficient in the language - tells a rich and meandering tale of a woman, separated from her son by distance and her husband by death, alone in the city of Chiang Mai, hundreds of miles from home. She is a poor country girl, who hates her dark skin - which I and any sane man would agree is gorgeous - and wishes she were fat. She says to be fat would be beautiful and perfect for her. If that's what makes her happy, then who am I to stand in her way? Oh, an she wants an ancient husband of sixty years. Well, actually, she doesn't say that anymore.
She spends much of her meagre amounts of spare time at temple, praying for her family and friends. But who prays for Meaw? Who cares for Meaw? She says she is not lonely and she can take care of herself. And she does. But I did not think she was truly happy. I have scarcely seen a more determined, strong and independant woman before and she is the equal or greater of most, if not all men. For all her svelte and slender size, she has a huge heart. And I think that is why I found myself falling truly, madly, deeply for her...despite the fact that my sweet Oh was waiting for me back on Koh Samui.
It was becoming obvious that something was developing between us yet neither of us could quite explain. Meaw had been living the chaste, hard-working life at the Pornping Tower Hotel - a respectable place, despite the name! - ever since she had come to Chiang Mai for work three years earlier. She had only changed jobs to a more freestyle, laidback massage shop a week before I met her. I had been thinking of only Oh on the journey North and in my few days in Chiang Mai, completely focussed on returning, lavishing her with promises of this fact.
Yet Meaw and I had gone out for noodles until 3am within an hour of meeting. Meaw never goes out to eat with customers. I don't get on the back of motorcycles with relative strangers, no matter how pretty, when there's someone out there, waiting patiently for me to return.Yet we did.
I had been in Chiang Mai for four days, and Oh was repeatedly asking me when I would return. Four days, I had told her.
Four days were up....
(Picture 3 - Maybe I just said something witty? No, I just snapped her in her knickers.)
....and I found myself with an unexpected and rather agonizing decision to make.
Meaw or Oh?
Whilst the decision on the day of writing this is as clear and as bright as the surface of the Sun, back in those early days, a small lifetime ago, it was not so simple. Much as I would like to say my macho ego was stroked by the fact that I had two women on the go, I was instead reduced to anxious hand-wringing, sweeping waves of guilt and a general sense of being a lowly dog of a man. And not the good kind of dog but rather the type that chews the furniture, makes sweet doggie love to your neighbour's leg every morning as he dashes, futilely for his car and drags it'sbackside across the living room carpet. That's right; the bad kind of dog.
Truth be told, I was happy to find that my thoughts of infidelity made me feel wretched, if only to serve as proof that I still have an ounce of human conscience, a shred of decency in my drug-addled, internet-curdled mind. It did not stop me from pursuing Meaw, though.So, on what may well have been - would most certainly not be, in fact - my penultimate night in Chiang Mai, I asked Meaw to help me with my decision. We found a dark corner of the massage parlour and wrapped a curtain about ourselves.
(Picture 4 - Meaw? Or Cousin It? Ididnotsaythat)
And I asked her,"Do you want me to stay?"
I knew the answer I wanted but I also knew the answer that the ever-so-virtuous Meaw would probably give...even if it was not what resided in that great heart of hers.
"You have a girlfriend in Koh Samui" she replied, refusing to look me in the eyes, as I stroked her cheek... an overly familiar move for a mere friend that she did not so much as flinch from.
"Yes..." I mumbled reluctantly "...but you know it's not that simple anymore. You know how I feel...about you"
My hands moved to her hips, moving beyond the platonic realm and into the unknown ethereal mists of fledgling intimacy. Meaw did not flinch but leaned into me, resting her head on my shoulder as we knelt facing one another in the low light, amidst the quiet chatter of the parlour, the miasmic fog of incense and tiger balm and the heady sensations that one feels when standing on the brow of something wonderful.
"You should go back to your Koh Samui and forget all about me"
I heard her sniff and raised her face to mine, to see the telltale trails of tears on her cheeks.
"You know how I feel, Meaw" I repeated, through teeth clenched not in annoyance but rather to cap the frothing emotions behind my lips. "Say it. Tell me to stay."
As the seconds crawled by, I knew that I had already made my decision but I, ever the pessimist unless faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, needed to hear from Meaw that it was not a choice I would quickly curse.
Our heads rested against one another, our hands now entwined, gripping so tightly that our fingertips were the colour of bone and out joints ached in quiet agony.
Meaw's eyes were closed.
"Say it" I said quietly. It is a peculiar thing yet my heart was not pounding. It was steady and calm, quite contrary to what the poets and authors of great repute and reknown would have you believe. Maybe it was the paroxetine. I don't think so; the fact is, I already knew the truth in her heart, just as she knew what choice I would make if she only spoke - 'most selfishly', as Meaw likes to say now - the truth.
She did not open her eyes. She did kiss me, once, twice, thrice on the lips until we were inseperable. In between gasping breaths, she said, at last, a single word.
"Stay!"
And so I did.
I knew there would be problems ahead. I knew there would be obstacles. I knew things would be far from perfect.
(Picture 5 - All gussied up for work, wearing a top that caused me to have a great many embarrassing moments whilst walking around the Chiang Mai streets with her. I am powerless before her)
But in that moment, I - we! - did not care. We would face the future, fight the future, together now.
That night, for the first time in four years, Meaw shared a bed with a man. For the first time in four years, Meaw was happy. This is what she told me.
"I tell you true" she whispered, ever so solemnly, in the early hours of the morning.
I told her, I had never been so happy. I told her true.
We slept, we loved, we smiled at one another that night, when I had made one of the most agonising and certainly the most important decision of my short life. We would continue to sleep and love and smile, and live the comfortable life in the great northern city of Chiang Mai, Thailand. There would be bumps, there would be more tears, there would be separation of body - though not heart - but we would endure.
Meaw and I were together.
*trouble has since been resolved! Huzzah! Chiang Mai isn't so very far away anymore!
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