Two phones

Siem Reap to Pattaya, October 2024

He had two phones. One between his legs, connected to an earbud. One by the wheel. He was texting on the first, calling his girlfriend, answering her back, all at full speed on the Bangkok-Pattaya highway.

I was in the front seat with Seneca on my lap. Seatbelt, as we could. He was asleep. Unaware of everything happening around him.

I had no control. Not on the driver, not on the road, not on the cars around us. I had to let go completely. I kept telling myself: he knows every curve. He does this every day. For him it is nothing.

We had come from Siem Reap. Tuk-tuks. Dusty roads. The slowest traffic in the world. The most beautiful people we have ever met. When you smile at them, they smile before you finish. They join their hands. I join mine.

Two hours on a Thai highway at full speed, a man with two phones, and my son sleeping through all of it.

He didn’t say a word to us the entire ride. When we arrived, he didn’t tell us the name of the hotel. He knew where we were going. He got us there.

We ate Thai food. Cheap and good. Seneca woke up long enough to eat, then slept again. Josh was already asleep. I wrote this at midnight with the music from the street still going. A wedding, or something. Nobody sleeping around here except my family.

Pattaya. Girls’ bars and 7-Elevens. A resort apartment with a pool for three hundred dollars a month. Very noisy here.

We are happy with that.