Filed: July 2, 2025, somewhere near the Cambodia border.
You ever get so empty the wind blows straight through you, like you’re not even real? That’s how I found Willie. Or maybe that’s how he found me. Depends on which one of us you believe.
It was a few weeks after the fallout—after the rescue, the re-routing, the psychic cauterizing. I had come to see him, of course, but there are parts of a man’s healing that don’t need witnesses. So I took a motorbike and headed east, chasing nothing in particular but quiet and perhaps a chance to breathe somewhere Willie hadn’t bled all over yet. Somewhere near the Cambodia border, I saw the kind of place that looks like it only exists to keep ghosts from getting too thirsty—a low slouching shack of a bar, tin roof pocked with rust, one bare bulb swinging like it had survived a thousand conversations no one wanted to remember. It was half-open, if that. A place where silence came standard with the beer.
I walked in like I’d been sent for, ordered a Leo, and found a seat on the shadow side of the room. The only other souls inside—besides the skeletal bartender—were a pair of men who looked like they’d been carved out of old teak and bad memories. They watched me like I might dissolve if they stared hard enough, but I didn’t flinch. Just opened my book, took a long pull from the bottle, and started reading like the pages might save me. Maybe they did. I didn’t speak, didn’t smile, didn’t shrink. That’s probably why they left me alone. Truth is, the Thai aren’t like most people. They may scowl, may look like war stories in waiting—but underneath, there’s usually still a softness, a reverence. Maybe it’s the Buddhism. Or maybe it’s just that in the real forgotten places, everyone knows better than to poke at a stranger’s silence.
I stayed about an hour. Drank two beers. Read until the light shifted and the sweat on my back became uncomfortable company. Paid in cash, nodded thanks, and left like I was never there. Nothing happened. And yet I remember it vividly. Some moments cling not because they were loud—but because they were exactly what the soul asked for without telling you it had asked.
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