GroundRoots

I arrived in the Highlands on Friday and immediately dropped my laundry off. I stupidly left my phone in the pocket of my pants. During that time, Tao arrived in Cameron Highlands. She’d tried to call me and sent me a number of messages, but I didn’t know that until she turned up at our hostel. After two days I’d relaxed into the rhythm of the new place and seeing her coming up the stairs with her backpack and her loud voice calling my name was a shock. ‘Lily! Why you don’t answer my calls?’ I was apologetic. I felt awful that she’d been trying to get into contact and couldn’t, but some part of me had simply not believed she would turn up. In the flighty, rootless way of a traveller I’d already left her behind when I left Kuala Lumpur.

When she showed up several times over the next few days at our hostel to hang out, I began to realise that I’d been hoping she wouldn’t. I’d started to make new friends whose company was less demanding. Her habit of dominating conversation made it difficult to have her around and still continue those interactions. I felt bad knowing that I was losing interest, and that it was becoming obvious to me, and probably to her. I found myself becoming absorbed in my work when she was around, bent over my laptop in concentration. Even then she would sit next to me, hovering over me and telling me half jokingly that I was being boring. When I finished my work, I’d immediately be locked into a conversation with her that quickly became a monologue about her life. I started to wonder why I hadn’t minded that level of self obsession before. I began to dread her phone calls and appearances at our hostel, because I knew I would be pulled away from whatever I was doing in order to interact with her on her own terms again. She would not join in whatever group activity I was up to. It was her or nothing. It was a relief when she left to go back to Langkawi, her home island. But it didn’t end there.

Over the next week I started getting regular messages and calls from her asking when I would be arriving. I have to admit, I only answered one in three, to tell her when we’d get there. I still wonder if it’s intellectual snobbery, cultural incompatibility or just the reality of being what I am, someone who is bored by that type of conversation, laden as it is with self absorbtion and sexual innuendo. I was beginning to feel the demands of a one-way relationship, and it made me anxious about our planned trip to Langkawi several days later. I said I’d visit long before I knew what she was like. And the whole situation was starting to have an eerie sense of familiarity.

This has happened to me before. Rochelle and Tanya were both girls who I’d befriended a few years ago. I’d been friends with Tanya for a month before I had to detach. Rochelle had become more integrated into my social network. We’d been friends for a year or more when I began to feel the burden of being supportive to someone who is consistently unstable (is that an oxymoron?). In both cases, I’d ended up at the wrong end of a one way friendship wondering how the hell I got there and feeling responsible for allowing it to go so far and then having to pull away. Is my screening process somehow faulty? Is it just natural that when you make a lot of friends, some of them turn out to be bad decisions? Do I attract unstable young women by appearing to be a vision of female confidence ( I say appearing..everyone’s got their insecurities)? Are my expectations of friendship just eventually too high for most people to fulfill? Or is it that I refuse to continue on with friendships that are unfulfilling safe in the knowledge that I have many which are, whereas other people may continue on with them our of necessity or fear? I’ve been wondering all of these things since I left Malaysia. I’m still unsure if I dealt with this friendship in the right way.

My and my two travel buddies caught two buses and a ferry to Langkawi as planned, several days after Tao had settled back in there. I spent the whole trip in a state of anxiety. I didn’t want to stay at her guesthouse. I knew that if I did, it would ruin my trip. I would feel beholden to her somehow, as though her decision to make me her friend somehow locked me into an obligation to give her my full attention. I didn’t want to do that. But I knew that if I went to stay somewhere else, she would be deeply offended. She’d take it personally. That within itself made me reluctant to see her. I don’t have a lot of patience for such sensitivity. So I agonised over it with my travel buddies. We alighted the pier, got in a cab, and made a last minute decision as we whizzed through the darkness to go stay at another place recommended by lonely planet. And just as we made that decision, the cab slowed down and pulled into the road we needed to follow. And just as it did, we went past Tao.

She looked straight at my face. There was no question of whether or not she recognised me. I stared back in shock, and managed a wave. She’d already messaged me, asking whether or not I had arrived. I decided not to reply to let her know our plans until we’d found a place- we might end up coming to stay with her after all, if everywhere was full. But there she was, staring at me through the cab window, perched on her motorbike. As we drove into the driveway of the guesthouse which wasn’t hers, she pulled up beside us and tapped on the window. She was frowning now. “Where you going? My guesthouse is over there”, she jabbed a finger to the right. “We’ve decided to try this one first, because it’s cheaper,” I said cheerfully, trying to play the nonchalant traveller. She scowled a dark scowl. Her face looked like a brewing storm. “Oh, that makes me very sad” she said, and shook her head. I shrugged. “Oh, well, shit”, I said jokingly, trying to pass it off as no big deal. It’s a backpacker’s right to go to the cheapest guesthouse, after all, I told myself. That still didn’t shield me from the knowledge that I’d seriously offended her. I guess the point was that I’d stopped caring about that. I’d made a decision to begin protecting myself from what I was starting to see as an unhealthy relationship. I wanted to do what I wanted, not what she wanted. And quite simply, what I wanted was not to hang out with her anymore. She took off on her motorbike. That was the last time I saw her, but it wasn’t the last interaction we had.

I agonised over the right thing to do after that. We found another guesthouse, and I paced the length of my new room, staring at my phone in consternation. I wanted desperately to be honest. I was tired of the bullshit and side stepping I’d been engaged in over the last several days in order to hide the fact that I didn’t want to hang out, just in case I offended her. I still like her in some ways, I believe she’s a good person. I think she’s lonely, and she probably often drives people away by doing what she did with me. I really didn’t want to cause such bad feeling between us. But the reality is that it was already there. It’s just that she didn’t know it, because I’d tried to shield her from it. I decided to let her know how I felt, out of respect as much as a desire to cut the bullshit. I sent her a message apologising for offending her by not staying with her, but admitting that I felt as though she wanted some sort of attention that I can’t give. I told her I can’t have a friendship like that.

She responded as I expected her to. Badly. She said that she was just trying to be friendly, that I wasn’t her type anyway, and that I wasn’t worth being friends with. She was obviously hurt. In her mind, she had shown me kindness, shown me around, had invited me into her home. In some ways she was right, she had opened herself up to me, had shown me around, and I had rejected her. But essentially she didn’t understand why and that my rejection didn’t mean that I didn’t like her despite finding her to be too overbearing for me to handle in the end. I can’t expect her to. I couldn’t explain it to her, and she wouldn’t understand if I did. I made a decision to leave it. To not try and extend that conversation any further. She might never know why she had this effect on me. But I suspect I’m not the only one.

I have this feeling that this happens to her regularly, that she drives people away by expecting their undivided attention. She never talked about her past, or her family. She lives in a guesthouse and grew up on a tourist Island. She never talked about local friends. One of her favourite topics of conversation were all the friends she made at the guesthouse. When she talked about them she’d focus on how they reacted to her rather than talk about their personalities. She’d talk about things she’d said to them, and how they laughed. I guess she felt accepted by foreigners. They were there to ahve a good time, not to judge. They are used to extrovert sexuality in a way that most Malaysians aren’t. These were foreigners who passed through, women who laughed off her advances and her one track mind, women who were living in places she may never be able to afford to get to. Women who never really had to take her seriously as a friend, because they were leaving before they had to start thinking deeply about the more complex and possibly damaged person that she is. She talked about one Swedish woman in particular. “She let me touch her boobies, you know”, she would say with a laugh and that big smile. It seemed to me a lonely existence.

Maybe I made the wrong decision by being honest. I thought it would free me from her in a way, that it would be an end to my feeling of being harassed. I was wrong about that. I couldn’t stay on Langkawi after that without looking over my shoulder. I really had no idea what she was capable of, and I half expected her to show up and throw a drink in my face. I felt awful for having upset her, and wished there was some way I could make everything clear to her. I had to keep reminding myself that all I did was tell her how she made me feel, and that how she dealt with that was her responsibility. She chose to lash out, instead of asking me why. I suppose I feel responsibility because I knew that this is how she would react, because I knew how she thought.

There are still so many maybes. The complexity of human relationships will always be full of maybes, amplified by being raised in different cultures, families and histories. We try to communicate past all of this, but sometimes it’s not possible, or desirable. When two people meet who have some things in common sometimes that’s not enough for a friendship. Sometimes the conflict outweighs the common ground. Sometimes you have to make a decision between keeping the peace and being honest. It doesn’t always work out.

I left Langkawi early, with a sigh of relief and a sense of confused exhaustion. As we cruised along between the picturesque limestone islands, gliding over pale blue tropical water, I was still troubled. How had I gotten myself into a situation where I seem to have made some sort of enemy out of a friend within two weeks of knowing them? I don’t have enemies, in general. I can’t say I’ve ever been hated that I know of. But I can’t say I’ve always been honest with people about how I feel about them either. As a rule, I just sort of stay away from the people I don’t get on with, but I can usually find something to like in most people. I guess that’s the thing about travel. You end up befriending people you wouldn’t normally. That’s a good thing, because it teaches you tolerance. But it can be bad too, like it was this time. Either way, it’s another life lesson.

Arriving in Thailand gave me a sense of distance, geographically, emotionally, culturally. I feel ok about what happened between me and Tao, although I hope that I didn’t hurt her too much by telling her how she made me feel. The dilemma of human interaction, however, remains- as always. When to lie and when to tell the truth will always be a regular dilemma of human relations. How much negative or selfish behaviour you tolerate for the sake of ‘keeping the peace’ is another issue altogether, an issue that’s followed me to Thailand, trashy party central for chavs, sex tourists and bogans worldwide. My friendship with Tao is just one version of this human story. ‘On a larger scale, perhaps,’ I mused on the boat leaving Langkawi, ‘this is exactly the sort of misunderstanding that starts wars’. How silly it all is. Hopefully your version will have a happier ending.