Page 28 of Friends with Benefits

I searched my memories for their smell, something that became harder each night. I tried to remember their voices, calm and loving. I willed myself to see every detail of their faces. My dad was becoming so distant, it terrified me. My mum came to me more easily, but she was fading too.

Silent tears rolled down my face and I could feel my heart beginning to beat too fast as I begged my mind to bring them back to me.

As my chest tightened, I heard my mum’s words. Deep breaths, baby. Deep breaths.

As I took control of my lungs, I told them in my mind how much I loved them. How I would see them one day, and how I would never forget them.

Eventually, my inhalations became longer.

The next morning, my cheap pocket alarm went off at four thirty. I silenced it as quickly as I could, although I still received a few grumbles from travelers who’d stayed out late drinking and wanted to rise at a sensible time. When I made it outside the hostel, Ruth and John were already waiting for me. Aunt Ruth held out a bag of rambutan.

‘Good morning, sunshine. Did you sleep well?’

I took the red prickly fruit and bit through the shell, then discarded it to suck the sweet translucent fruit inside. Nodding as I chewed, I eventually told her, ‘Can a few hours qualify as sleep?’

She raised a brow. ‘Were you reading again?’

That and they had forced me to wake at the crack of sparrows. I shrugged and took another rambutan from her as we headed in the direction of a local bus. We rode with chickens, local people carrying huge bags of rice, and the occasional baboon that jumped on the roof when we stopped. After my bum had gone numb from the hard seats and the bumpy ride over dirt roads and potholes, we arrived in Vang Vieng.

Once we’d dumped our backpacks in yet another hostel, Ruth and John prepared themselves for yoga and meditation. I was hungry and tired of sitting down, so I left them to it and went to explore the city.

You’re probably thinking I was too young to be exploring a new place, in a new country, with a vastly different culture from the small country town in England where I had grown up. Frankly, I was. But I will say this for Ruth and John: they never treated me like a child. They always spoke to me as if I were a young adult. Sometimes, I did wish they would put an arm around me, nurture me, tell me it was okay to be a child. Other times, I realize, looking back, they showed me things about the world and people that I would have never experienced if I had stayed in my small town.

I wandered until I reached the river. There, I listened to the water as it rolled idly by, as if it didn’t have a care in the world. As if it had nowhere to go, but that didn’t matter because there was only one direction to travel. One path. And it would have to flow the course. It was the destiny the Earth had given it. It just had to get on with it. I felt the inevitable flow of the river in my own inability to control or change my path.

Then I picked up my head and gasped at the lush green mountains towering over me. I thought I had never seen anything more beautiful in my life. In that moment, I understood how small and inconsequential I was in the grand scheme of life and death. And I made a decision to accept that I couldn’t change my destiny. It just was. I just was. I was alone and that had to be okay.

For two years, I had longed to have a sibling, or to stay in one place long enough to make a friend. I had pleaded with whatever higher power existed, I had begged my parents to send someone to me, someone who could share my pain and alleviate the weight in my chest, if only by an ounce.

Under the shadow of the mountains, I cried. My tears fell to the river’s edge and I imagined them being carried away, taken to somewhere my parents could hear me. I knew that somewhere, one day, I wouldn’t be alone. That one day, my flow would find a home, where it could be still. Until then, I had to protect myself. I had to look out for my heart. Because I knew it couldn’t take any more pain.

Ruth told me that I should enjoy the freedom of traveling and not having a routine like other kids. She said I should see the branches of the tree she and John gave me. ‘Feel the wind through your new leaves, Jess. Experience. Feel,’ she would say. I decided watching that river flow to experience my branches and leaves. And I never gave up hope that I could someday have roots to my tree and that they would anchor me.

* * *

I was eating street food in Luang Prabang with Ruth and John, sitting on a pink plastic stool for children at an elderly gentleman’s stall, a bowl of sticky rice in my lap, when I overheard some other travelers being told about the Buddhist Alms Giving Ceremony that took place each morning. When I enquired about it, the street vendor was happy to share his knowledge with me.

‘Every day at sunrise,’ he told me, in his broken English, ‘the monks come from their temples. They bring baskets and people offer them food for their one meal of the day.’

‘Could I go?’ I asked him.

‘Of course. All welcome. But you must obey rules. Cover your skin and arrive before the monks. Offer your food but do not get close and do not try to talk to them. You must be respectful.’

I nodded. ‘Of course.’ I turned to Ruth. ‘Can we go?’

‘We have meditation at sunrise, Jess. But you could go alone.’

Alone. Of course. It was something I was too familiar with.

But I bought rice from the street vendor and took it home that night. I asked Ruth and John to wake me before sunrise and I went down to the ceremony. I stood next to a local lady who barely spoke English, as we waited in a line along the street the monks would traverse. She tugged on my baggy pants and kaftan, which I wore to cover my knees and shoulders. She pointed to her feet, which were naked, and then to mine, which were in sandals.

Understanding her, I took off my shoes and followed her lead as she sat on the ground and tucked her legs beneath her. When the monks came by in a line, I, like her, held out my rice for them to take, sneaking a glance, even though I was told not to stare.

The young boy I offered food smiled at me, even though I knew he shouldn’t, and I couldn’t help smiling as I tucked my head down again.

The sun began to rise and heat my body. I felt the warmth of the new day and the warmth of being part of something. It kept my shadows away and it masked my pain, even from me, for the moments I sat on the ground. I promised myself I would hang on to the feeling for as long as I possibly could. Tomorrow, I could steal the heat of sunrise again.

After the ceremony, I wandered the street market. I bought a banana and a handful of rambutan for breakfast and I sat on a wall to eat, looking out to the Mekong River.

---