Yet, every time I come back to Phuket, I can’t help but remember the old woman and the dead boy. The long years have passed, but the memories continue to hold strong as if they have already sunk into parts of me that still want to remember. Perhaps, remembering is the hardest part of everything that happened—the constant dredging up of memories that have stayed deep inside me, holding me to the past. They would have crushed me, if I had not learnt to live with them over the years.
My relationship with Cody did not survive after we came back, though we kept at it for another three months before deciding to end it. The separation was easier and more painless than I would have thought. I found a new flat, moved out, and quickly established a quiet life of simple routines. I kept myself busy, and the life I made slowly took on a definite—although not entirely unfulfilling—state, a life I could somehow manage with little disruption. It is strange and oddly easy how one can get used to being single after a period of adjustment.
I was clearing out some old boxes from the storeroom a few months ago and came across Cody’s old Motorola phone. The battery was dead so I searched around the flat for the phone charger, and realised later that I had thrown it out—the phone was already many years out of date—along with the other old, unused electronic parts, during my move. I wanted to check what was in the phone, to read the messages, but the urgency passed soon enough, and it seemed rather fatuous after I thought through it.
Yet it does not mean the memories are dead to me. I’ll be on the MRT heading to work, or washing the dishes after dinner, and suddenly a random memory sneaks into my thoughts—an image of Cody or the old woman, or sometimes the dead boy. These images flit and linger for a while, but I do not allow them any purchase on my mind; I have learnt to keep a distance from these old memories, to blunt their edges.
It is only during my annual trips to Phuket that I allow myself a deeper introspection, to give myself permission to think about those days back in 2004. I would walk down Bangla Road in Patong and see two men walking towards me, and I would pause and remember a similar scene from that time. Even a glance at a peddler hawking preserved tamarinds and sour plums near a junction was enough to trigger a fragment of memory about the old woman. And there was that time I came across a beggar boy with a shrivelled right foot at the night market in Phuket Town, wearing a tin can strung around his neck, and sitting before a dirty, badly scrawled square of cardboard—there was something about his face, in the tilt of his head, that caused a lurch in my heart; but of course it wasn’t him, it couldn’t possibly be. For one thing, there was no scar across his left eye. I knew enough to keep my thoughts grounded, to differentiate the real from the imagined. It’s not easy though—the pull of the past is a siren’s call, beckoning and summoning, and it’s inevitable to be tricked from time to time.
On my last trip to Phuket, I visited Phromthep Cape, at the southern tip of the island, having spent a day of walking without any particular aim or direction in mind. I had been there a few times over the years, and I always loved the views it offered—the sunset, the outlying islands, the sea. There was still a light crowd at that time of the day, mostly tourists armed with phone cameras, and I made sure to skirt the lighthouse and the shrine, to escape the noise and commotion. I took a narrow foot path down a slope and followed it for a while, as it wound itself up a slight incline, past dry shrubs of calf-height brown grass, and ended at a quiet lookout. From where I was standing, I saw two dark spots—eagles? seagulls?—moving across the sky, one behind the other, punctuating its wide, clear expanse. They never flew close enough to the island for me to identify them. For some time, I watched them glide through the sky before they disappeared, farther out into the sea.
Sitting down, I heard the tall grass swishing around me, and when I listened closely, I could hear the waves—so soft, barely there. Maybe because I was trying hard in such moments not to stir up anything in my head, I heard something: the faint traces of a song. I looked around, straining to catch further wisps of it, but there was nothing but the sound of the waves, and the wind making its way through the grass. I looked out to the sea—already darkening in the dying light—and let my mind quiet itself. Then, turning to my right, looking farther down along the coast, I saw something—a figure, standing at another viewing point along the ridge. I studied the figure for a while—a man, clearly—and waited for him to—to see me? to make a move? to disappear? I could not complete the thought in my head then.
But as I watched the man’s solitary figure, his stillness, I could not help but think about Cody and the last time we had stood at such a promontory—was it a lifetime ago?—and looked out at the sea, hearing the waves coming to us as if from another world, breaking into ours. In my mind’s eye, I saw both of us standing there, taking in the view, immersed in our own thoughts, alone in our separate worlds.
I could have let my imagination go—to recreate this memory in my head again—but I did not. The memory would not have been real; I would have coloured it with something else, and it would not have done me any good, to confuse what was there with what wasn’t. I would have changed Cody in that memory, making him into a man I wished he had been, but of course, he had always been who he was, no matter how I had imagined him in these memories.
I must have been steeped in my thoughts, for when I looked at the man again, I noticed that he had turned in my direction, holding his hand up. For a moment, I thought he was waving at me, and I wanted to return the gesture. But he was merely shielding his eyes from the glare, his gaze trained on something along the distant shoreline, down the coast. I dropped my half-lifted hand to my lap, feeling foolish at my near-mistake.
For whatever reason I could not quite fathom, I continued to watch the man as he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted into the air. The timbre of his voice caught the lift of the wind, which carried it across the hushed landscape. I imagined those words—I couldn’t hear them clearly from where I was sitting—trailing down the slope, off the cliffs, and into the sea, fading and fading until they were no more. The sound, and the echo, gone—the things we lost to the sea.
The man stood for several moments longer, then turned to walk down a path. I waited in the growing dark, watching him leave, holding back something beating wildly inside me that had wanted to chase after him, to tap him on the shoulder, to make him stay. I held back—it was enough to have this longing, it had to be enough.