A silver fish for an anchored necklace

THE END.

Here I am, decomposing and restructuring chaotic feelings that "vulture" mercilessly round and round my confused little scalp... it's as if the whole trip was dreamt and nothing more; it's Asia no more.
I've two friends in the hospital, a huge animation project due next week and a sudden feel for french vanilla tea (since I can't seem to muster enough sleep I've had to come up with an alternative to coffee), that and cheese.

Oh! and all of a sudden I realize I'm way more hyperactive whenever speaking English than I am in any other language. I pity those who can't speak "Mexican" then: they get the most pungent side of me. Jumpy Xalli.

Funny, when I look at the postcards I bought at the very shabby looking shop in Koh Samet (where the lady was quite nasty indeed) I suddenly become swallowed by a torrent of flashbacks that pixelate(sic) the 4 walls of this studio into a somewhat befuddled composition of greens and yellows. And so I'm driven back to the old Thai pueblo:

"See you at 7 downstairs in the guesthouse"
This is how our good friend Amir bade us farewell every single day at 5 o'clock, right after wrapping up our heavy load of Lesson Planning endless sheets and sheets and shit-that-was-long. The burden of being a teacher trainee; rookie textual scourging! shpaaaa!
Weary and longing for shorts we all nodded, mentally absent, and emitted a brief "hhuuuaaauuhhh" to him in reply... Chewbacca-like, and not necessarily meaning we would actually go and succumb to his request. But most times we did take the 15 minute trudge under the unforgiving Thai sun towards the TAWANINN after class. We did it just for kicks and knowing we would be welcomed by a smiling Egyptian with a huge heart (and a keen Thai stalker woman who chucked rocks at his window, and left hieroglyphic love notes in his room; very much like a Shakespearean scene directed by Tarantino). He always opened up the door wearing his PJ's looking as if he'd been sleeping for a straight century and dreaming of magic carpets (hahaha not really).

We just sat there on his balcony, siping away our tiredness out of a stolen red bucket filled with a dodgy and marvelous tasting whiskey/rum and average coke. Oh, the 10 baht bottles of Redbull!

But on that last Thursday we spent together there was something different in the taste of the pavement, in the smell of the motionless trees stuck on the earth, in the fluency dictated by each of our corporal movements... Everything was so beautiful it killed me! But I wasn't going to show it, no sir, not tonight; and so I squeezed every single second belonging to that fruitful evening and did not sleep for a single bit. I thought that if I stretched time by being awake I would manage to freeze the vivacity of the actual sequence of events that came to happen as purely as possible; Distilling them into perpetually fresh memories for and from the wallpaper of my conscience. I'm an artist and I'm crazy and this is what I remember:

Our last lesson turned out to be just right in spite of the unexpected impediments; no one fucked up (not real bad anyways) with the structural process, even though the heat was intense! And we appeared more like melting icicles than very professional English teachers. But the high school Thai kids were supportive, and giggled at Lina's disastrous attempts of drawing a map of China; the result resembled what we thought out to be a monkey tumor!!! So the three of us (JJ, Rebecca and myself) were suppressing euphoric explosions of laughter at the back of the room. Hilarious. At least she did not sketch a giant beach ball and tried to persuade the students it was "THE WORLD".

We wore our pink patrol uniforms (the King's T shirt with a bright and pupil-killing version of a pink color), so we looked cutely retarded I suppose. And we kicked ass! We so did kick it that our supervisor for the session (Rebecca) doodled away with passion and admiration all over our report sheets... out of pure love for our work, that AND boredom. Oh, behold the young and the restless!
I don't think JJ's ever hated the warmer as much as that day (he came first and had to cope through both our apparently never-ending introductions), but we all survived the day. And so we boarded our glorious ship (Tao's minibus) along with the other three trainees (Lester, Hollie, and Amir) towards our home-for-the-month: the grayest TEFL building of 'em all.

Back in the classroom Dave (the BAWSE) told us to finish filling up our manuals and deliver them at 2 o' clock in the afternoon... after that we were FREE like soaring butterflies on a November skyline. DRINKING TIME!