Koh Lipe

Wearily, smilingly, your dusty hands pass me another lychee and rest back on your feet. You take another sip of your Chang. This is a
tiring peace; it is not tranquility, it is beat out burnt out ashes of peace and I breathe it in while the mosquitoes bite me. I watch the pile
of coughing Germans, envious of their sarong-soothed shell necklaced sleep and wonder how it is I came to be here. You liked the Rolling
Stones, whispered short stories of India and fed me Indonesian cigarettes. Everything slowed
down and now we are a dusty ball on a boat in an oily sea where I don't have to strain to see the stars and your messy black hair is now ours.
Our direction is nothing in this dark.

Morning is a surprising retreat from this tropical heat and we shiver in our faded jeans, minds obsessed with dusty sunshine and craving
cigarettes. A few sleepy faces sit and meet the sea but the Germans still dream. Trance and soft whispers show the first signs of life, but
we are weary of both. Your beautiful eyes are alive as soon as they meet the light and me, I watch them water as you cough on your
breakfast of smoke and wonder vaguely what my mother would make of us two. I have a triumphant minute alone on the bales of straw outside and
glow and grin to know that my life is now what I have always dreamed: nothing but which is spoken between us two.

I peel another lychee with dirty fingernails; your eyes have retreated into sleep on my lap. I wrote a poem about lychees which I now forget. When you awake we tiptoe over stepping stones of Thais: Sa bai di mei? You grin, Sa bai di kaa, Sa bai di kaa. We reach flip flops and fresh warm air and eventually shore. I ache and sigh and smile at the sight of our new home, paddle through knee deep water and collapse, pulling you over, on coral and sand.