Effectively Returned, Albeit Somewhat Displaced.
Freshly adorned with several inches of extra hair and a full cup size larger in the chest (the former belonging to an anonymous donor and fixed to my crown by a muscular transvestite, the latter quite unexpected and entirely authentic, just to reassure you), I return from my month-long vacation to The Land Of Smiles And Inexpensive Contraband Accessories, Thailand. I return, ofcourse, to a sparse guest room next to my mother's kitchen (to quote The Simpson's Principal Skinner, "My mother lives with me."), in a city cold and unforgivably alienating, of which I've often previously visited but have only inhabited for a mere two months before toting an empty suitcase to the smoggy climate and grimy streets of South-East Asia.
I return, now, with enviable memories and inexpressibly broadened vision. But like an unmedicated bipolar patient, with my felicity and excess comes, lurking in the juices of insufficiently heated aeroplane food, gloom, disenchantment and a dazzlingly vacant bank account. I've become trapped between the stark plotted streets and their towering, glassy office buildings, within layers of tenement walls, a prison of brick, cement and framed unrealities, under swathes of starched cotton, knitted wool and goose-bumped skin. A utilities bill lies stiff and despised on the kitchen table, a customs officer probes a gloved hand into the lining of my suitcase, a bus driver barks an answer in perfect unsmiling English. As I smother the embers of my cigarette beneath the glare of a disapproving waiter and pay for a mind-bogglingly overpriced coffee, I try to convince myself that this is my home. Its absurdities and charms have not taken root in my life, yet, and its image is vague and blurry in the unfinished painting of my future, but I have given myself no other choice but to inhale its breath and follow its undulations, at times hesitant but always steadfast amid the miasma of exorbitant price tags and no-smoking signs.
