When Travel Takes You Home

That being lonely is not always a function of being alone is a truism so widely held as to be cliched, and yet that cliché was painfully apposite to my state of mind as I meandered, aimless and torpid, through the Saturday-evening street market of Thong Sala, on the small island of Koh Phangan, Thailand.

I was awash in the colors and the miasma of sweetly-scented street foods of the market, adrift on a sea of unfamiliar faces, and beset on all sides by the cheery early-evening chatter of sunburned tourists and well-tanned Thais, but I passed through as at a distance. I couldn't shake my loneliness- couldn't help but wonder how I'd ended up so far from home, an ocean and more away from my friends and family in America. I couldn't quite tell what I'd been running from, or what it was I was running towards.

I left the crowd on the street and went to watch the sun set over the ocean. I had the beach to myself, excepting two young Thai boys- brothers, I assumed- playing at the water's edge. They were absorbed in a universe of their own creation, distracted with an intensity only children seem to be capable of, and as I watched them play in the sand, equally oblivious both to my presence and to the breathtaking majesty of the sun sinking languid and eternal into the sea, I was brought crashing on a wave of nostalgia back to my own childhood. To evenings spent inventing universes with my own brother. To a time when home was all I knew, and I was unencumbered by questions of who I was, or where I was going, or how I'd gotten there.

In those brothers at play I saw myself, thousands of miles from home, at play with my own brother, and I was floored by an overwhelming and numinous sense of belonging. And while I still wasn't able to articulate exactly how or why I'd ended up standing there, on that beach, I found a sort of atavistic pleasure in knowing that Life, seemingly so aleatoric in its machinations, had found me there, reminiscing in the presence of something at once insignificant and enduringly human. Children at play had assuaged my loneliness and in an instant brought me back home. The three of us, ignorant even of each others' names and separated by vast oceans of experiences, were united, there, in that common one.