My mouth contorts, fighting not to make an expression of pure revulsion or to outright gag while I force this beer down. I’ve never been able to stomach beer, but I feel this momentous occasion demands that I follow suit and have what he’s having. I feel my insides turn as the beer goes down and realize I’ve also been holding my breath. Whether this is from the strain of drinking or the excitement of somehow talking to Hermann Hesse is impossible to say. With careful attention I slowly release a deep exhale. Soften. Relax.

He knows all the most profound secrets to life, I’m sure. Everything I’ve been looking for is here within my reach, if I can only act natural, drink this damn beer, and maintain a conversation like a normal human.

Unfortunately, I am a terrible conversationalist and this frail old man is keeping awfully tight lipped. If you had asked me what I expected of this meeting I would have told you that I thought this would be a philosophical dialogue. I thought he would lead me eloquently through the defenses of my own mind; all the obstructions holding me back from true enlightenment would break down before his comprehensive yet concise insights to the true nature of the Self.

Slightly hunched over his glass, he takes a slow sip and gazes into the fire. The tavern is dimly lit and doesn't seem to have many light sources beyond the fireplace that we're seated around. I can feel the movement of the coil springs beneath me with each shift I make in this threadbare armchair that smells vaguely of mothballs. I lean forward and follow his gaze into the crackling flames. This is it, I think. Just like in Demian, we’re gazing into the fire, ready for a profound shift in understanding as we discuss the complexities of life, authenticity, the Self.

The flickering light of the fire is casting odd shadows across his form, and I notice the subtle change in posture that occurs the moment he becomes aware of me staring at him so expectantly. With only vague interest, he asks why I’m watching him.

I stammer out awkwardly, “Oh...uh, sorry. I didn’t mean to bother you. I mean, I was just hoping to hear something, uh, some elucidating thoughts from you I guess. I’m, um, just a really big fan of your books so...”

Trailing off into silence, I feel warmth in my face as the color rushes up to my cheeks, but I convince myself it is only the heat of the fire. I look down in embarrassment, trying my best to be casual and hoping he won’t notice how awkward I feel. I can smell the smoke from the fire, that comforting aroma that always recalls a nostalgia for home. I take a deep breath, inhaling the scent, and then look back up to check his reaction, again feigning a casual air.

He smiles to himself as though enjoying a private joke, but all he does is look back to the flames. He is comfortably ensconced in his own rather plumper armchair, at ease. No words are forthcoming.

For reasons unbeknownst to me, I blunder on, “So, I guess that’s the point though right? No one else can tell you or explain what it means, what you write about...you have to, like, find it in yourself.”

Utterly bewildered by my own clumsy words, I listen to my flimsy attempts at conversation as though from outside my own body, watching a helpless stranger. If this is a dream, might as well.

Briefly glancing in my direction, he mercifully cuts off my babbling, “You’re trying too hard. Just relax.”

I laugh nervously and force down another gulp of the beer before settling into silence. I look into the fire. I am no more enlightened now then I was before, only sufficiently embarrassed and a tad sick from the beer. I’ve got a few more of his books at home to read, maybe I’ll glean the answers I seek from the pages instead. Perhaps I’ll just reread Siddhartha for the millionth time.

I suppose this is why I like reading books better than talking to people.

The skin on her face is sagging away from the bones, thinned out and drooping as though it’s barely hanging on. Her hair is wispy and her eyes are slightly glazed over. I wonder how much of her is still in there. Despite this, she is still happy to talk to me, as she does now in the courtyard where we are sitting on an old park bench, enjoying the sun. We can chatter on happily for an hour or so, though little of what she says ever makes much sense. Occasionally, I catch a glimpse of who she may have once been. Something unbeknownst to anyone but her will trigger her memory, and, for a brief moment, she will seem to experience a return to lucidity. These are short lived moments though.

I have worked at this memory care facility for 3 years now; I know just about every resident personally, though they may not always remember me. Olivia was here already before I got the job. She’s 87, suffering from Alzheimer’s for about ten years now, though it’s hard to give an exact number. She has been at this facility for 6 years.

I know that she worked in some old department store, like a Macy’s, for most of her life. She has two adult children, and a brood of grandchildren too. Her husband passed when she was 75, and she began to go downhill after that. Long retired, alone in an empty house, children gone, tenuous connections with the neighbors and similarly aging friends on the edges of their lives.

Her children still visited, in the beginning thinking her to be competent and without much need for them. But with each visit they slowly began to reluctantly notice her deterioration. First something innocuous like a slip up on someone’s name. Then something a little more concerning, like a confusing argument about how long it’s been since the last visit, for she wouldn’t believe that they were there just last week. Eventually it grew more serious. They worried about her driving alone. Her body became more frail, shaky hands that perhaps should not have been handling boiling water or pulling baking sheets out of the oven.

So it was for her as it was for so many other residents. The children couldn’t take her in to their homes, for they had jobs, children of their own in school, and no one to help her throughout the day. It was the best decision for everyone, most of all her, a potential danger to herself as she deteriorated, to have her in a full time residential center where there would always be people available to take care of her throughout the day.

And we do take care of her. Her and all the other residents we have, who find companionship and new lives here. We facilitate activities and take them on trips, keep them engaged. I like to think they’re happy here, most of them. Olivia’s favorite activity is the dance lessons we have every couple of weeks. A guest instructor comes in and works with the more agile and physically adept residents, a group that Olivia is luckily still a member of. The music reinvigorates a little more life back into her, and she enthusiastically tries to learn the simple steps from the ever patient instructor, who always keeps a cheery voice as she repeats her instructions each time over and over just as happily.

Today there are no special visits but we had an arts and crafts activity before this. Most of them made a mess with the paints, but everyone had a good time. Olivia still has the remnants of purple and blue pigments on her fingers where the paint didn’t quite wash off fully. She is rubbing at them now, frowning with concentration and wrinkling her brow in apparent confusion as she struggles to fix this most pressing issue. I try to distract her by drawing her attention to the little sparrow hopping towards us.

“Look, Olivia, isn’t he a cute little guy?” I take one of her hands in mine and point to the tiny bird eyeing us warily from a couple feet away. She looks first to my hand, holding hers, and then to the bird. Muttering something indistinct, the hint of a smile appears on her face.

Seizing this new point of interest, I continue to hold her attention on this distraction as best I can. “Wow, wouldn’t it be neat if he jumped up here with us? I hope he doesn’t fly away,” I babble on while her eyes follow the bird happily.

And then, a rare cogent sentence from Olivia. Not even just one, but two.

“Where is Dakotah? Is she going to visit today?”

Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t better that their memories are gone, that they don’t have to miss their children, their spouses, their independence, their lives. Or, is it just that it makes it easier for me? Working with a child in an aging body is far less emotionally taxing than explaining to a diminished adult why they won’t be seeing their family today. Or tomorrow. Or the next day.

Dakotah, her oldest daughter, used to visit several times a week, bringing her own children with her usually too. But then she got a promotion at work, a much needed pay raise to support her three children better, but it necessitated a move to a satellite location the next town over. It’s an hour’s drive away, which is actually still pretty close for Olivia. Many of the other residents don’t have any family members within such easy reach. Still, the move has meant that Dakotah comes only once a week now. She comes on the weekends, usually Sundays after church. Today is Monday.

“Dakotah comes on Sundays now, Olivia. She was here yesterday. Remember the children brought you those drawings they made for you at school?”

This doesn’t seem to register with her. She looks at me confused, expecting me to say more, as though the sentences I’ve just uttered are a foreign language.

“Is she coming?”

When getting exasperated with the residents, sometimes you just have to tell them what they want to hear to help keep everything simple and harmonious. Their capacity for reasoning and memory is so impaired that sometimes there isn’t much more you can do. They can’t follow logical trains of thought, and sometimes their confusion will make them angry. I know it’s necessary, but every time I have to tell one of these lies I feel a surge of something like guilt, mixed with pity. Some day I could be there, with people far younger than me coaxing me with happy lies to keep me complacent.

“Yes, she should be here soon,” I tell Olivia. She smiles and diverts her attention back to rubbing the leftover paint from her fingers.

“Laundry is picked up in the morning on Mondays. Just leave your basket with dirty clothes on the porch and then when you get back from work she will return it cleaned, folded. The school pays for this. Only, do not put socks, underwear, bras in the basket. These things are personal for us in Thailand; you will wash these by hand. There is a bucket for this in the kitchen.”

The thought of hand washing my underwear in a bucket makes me cringe internally, but I smile, nod, and say something neutral indicating my attentiveness to the barrage of information that’s been coming at me in an unrelenting stream for the past 20 minutes in this van speeding out of Bangkok. So far we have discussed my new house, the other American girl who I will be living with, the bills that the school will pay for, the bills I will have to pay for myself, the bicycle I will be given for transportation between school and my house, and of course, my work schedule. In my hand I clutch a small slip of paper bearing a few Thai characters but mostly just numbers indicating times and grade levels of the classes I will be teaching. Sompit, the school coordinator for foreign English teachers like me, has explained details of these classes to me already.

It is a secondary school of the six upper grade levels, and I will be teaching at least one class for all of them. There are seven periods a day, just like my old high school in Florida, but the students have different classes each day of the week. Most of the classes I will be teaching are in the English Program, in which students’ families pay to put them in smaller classes where almost everything, including science and math, is taught in English. However I also have some classes with the general population-huge classes of 50 students who only hear English once or twice a week in their language class.

I am nervous.

I am less than confident in my ability to teach these classes. I have never taught in a classroom before and have no education background or training. The agency that I contracted with to place me at this school provided a week long orientation in Bangkok for all new teachers -just some basic classes on teaching activities and techniques-but I feel comically unprepared.

I look out the window of the school van we are riding in. Packed traffic the likes of which I’ve never seen surrounds us on all sides of the highway. Swarms of motorcycles weave in and out of the cars, coming perilously close to crashing as they inch through tiny gaps at terrifying speeds. The Bangkok skyline is expansive but is diminishing behind us as we make our way out of the city towards the rural town where my new home will be. There are skyscrapers across the horizon; I’ve never been in a city this big before. It hits me in a sudden wave of panic how far from home I am. I know no one here. I am alone in this strange new country for the next half year.

Sompit is trying to ask me more questions but now I am overwhelmed. I feel a lump in my throat and pinpricks at the corners of my eyes. I pretend that I am carsick and ask if it’s okay for me to close my eyes for a bit to try to sleep. She is very accommodating and shows me how to recline my seat back.

I am not sleeping.

I am thinking about how much lies ahead of me and how utterly alone I am. What if I get sick? I’ll be in a hospital on the other side of the world; I won’t be able to just call my mom or my best friend. No one will be there to take care of me. I thought long and hard about my decision to move to Thailand and teach English, but now all of it seems so brash and hasty. What was I thinking? What am I even doing? I don’t belong here. I swallow the lump in my throat and pretend to sleep.

*****

I am in my new house, alone. Sompit helped me bring my luggage in and took me out to dinner. It was just a roadside food stand but it was delicious. Khao Phad Pak, vegetable fried rice, soon to become an almost daily meal for me here. Thailand’s vegetarian options are actually pretty limited. After dinner Sompit dropped me off, leaving me alone for the first time since arriving in this country a week ago. My roommate, who has already been teaching at the school for one semester, is travelling for the weekend and won’t be back for another day or two.

I sit down at the small table pushed against the wall next to the refrigerator. Sompit has left a few basics in there: bottled water and a few cartons of soymilk. There is no AC in this part of the house so the air is hot and humid. I feel beads of sweat forming on my face and back. In Thailand you take your shoes off when entering a house so I am barefoot. I feel cool tile beneath my feet. It is dark outside but bright under the harsh lights in the house, which doesn’t feel like a home.

I look at the wall in front of me and see two pictures, postcard sized, left there by my current roommate or former inhabitants of this house; it has been used to house the foreign English teachers for years. One picture is a silhouette of a single figure wearing a backpack and standing on a mountain. Large bold words are plastered across the bottom: “Take a hike.” The other picture is a group of friends sitting around a campfire on a beach. Its message: “Get lost.” I look at these pictures and wonder about who put them there. What travels did they go on in this strange new country, what did these images mean to them? The enormity of what I’ve done and what is yet to come hits me in a wave again, like it did in the van. It feels preposterous that I should be here at all. Unbelievable that I’m embarking on a new phase of life with not just a new job or a move to a new city, as someone more reasonable may have done for a fresh start, but a whole new country, a completely different culture.

This time I don’t need to pretend to be asleep. The wave escapes me in a laugh that is also a cry, impossible to tell which. There are so many opportunities open before me, which is both terrifying and thrilling. I came here with hopes that I could enter a new world and be something different, yet here I am, still just me, sitting alone in a small house, completely bewildered by this new life I am creating. I laugh-cry some more because I don’t know what else to do.

It’s completely ridiculous that I am here. I love it.