Snapshot Synaptogenesis

Serendipity Beach on Cambodia’s southwestern coast had not been in my plans, but my sore bones and reeling heart needed peace. I wanted a quiet, less crowded place to try and steel myself against that brutal, incredible country. It was an ill-informed choice.

I’d been after an affordable, exotic vacation, so I chose Thailand and I loved photos of half jungle-eaten old ruins, so I decided to hop the border to Cambodia for a visit to Angkor Wat. By 7 days in, I wondered how it hadn’t crossed my mind that maybe, considering my aversion to the suffering of others, I was biting off more than I could chew as a first-timer outside the U.S.

A week earlier, we’d taken a bumpy, sticky bus ride from Bangkok to Siem Reap to wander the ruins at Angkor Wat. But what I remembered most was the little girl selling postcards at the top one of the temples, whose eyes had grown wide and worried after my friend handed her a $10 bill, looking around in all directions before shoving it deep into a pocket of her skirt. Then we’d gone to Phnom Penh, where a young boy had followed me around the Killing Fields monument, slowly creeping closer until finally grabbing my wrist with a strength I was shocked someone so small could possess, and demanding that I give him money. We both knew I had it, but I was afraid. I twisted out of his grip with a cruel bark and walked away, ashamed.

It made my coconut-rum shake taste like gravity. I sipped it mechanically, grateful for cheap, large-lensed sunglasses. They hid my eyes as I watched one human being after another crawl through the sand to stop by each group of tourists and ask for money — this one missing a leg and an arm, that one missing both legs, another missing three limbs and being carried by someone else.

I had not been born when the landmines that still saturate the countryside in Cambodia were buried. Nor, I am guessing, had the young man who was then dragging his torso across the beach to where we sat. He stopped in front of me, cupped his hands and held them out, offering me the real world. I still don’t know what I should have done, but I pressed my fingernails into the underside of my chair and I froze solid, like a chameleon, as if to avoid being seen. We looked at each other long enough that my friends fell silent. I remember distantly realizing that I was in the middle of something that would alter who I was. I’d taken the red pill. He gave up the staring contest first, but I had hardly ever felt less like a victor.