I created this blog a while back to write about my life in Cambodia with my wife and soon-to-be daughter. Things didn't quite work out that way in the end and I lost them both in January, 100 days ago.
In the world I'm a taciturn guy, most days I'd be hard pressed to come up with more than a sentence or two but this has left me feeling as though I'm going to burst. Words seem to well up late at night, fresh bubbles spring up through cracks in the stone and just as quick they've gone, like water disappears into the cracks around an old pump, just drops left behind, catching the light.
Zero dark thirty is the worst time, midnight until dawn, prowling around the apartment trying not to wake the neighbours and feeling like a caged animal. The days aren't great but it's the cold oppressive hours before light that leave me nested in our shared life; still stuffed in boxes and scattered on the floor of the spare room. Packed in such a hurry that I had no time to label anything, jammed into canvas military bags. Could hear her telling me off for my haphazard packing and for smoking inside the house. Saw her out of the corner of my eye, one hand on the door frame, the other on her hip, wearing my white shirt with her hair knotted high on her head and one critical eyebrow raised. When I turned it was the midwife, four feet tall, rasping sobs and shouting at me in Khmer; what kind of fool was I to let my wife alone in a car? As though I could ever stop her from doing exactly as she pleased. As though the first thought in my mind every time she left the house should have been the many myriad ways in which I could lose my tiny, growing family. Picking up those bags and loading the truck, running to England, not home but just home enough to get me by. Perhaps.
And now, those wretched bags. Unlabelled, unsorted, random haphazard jumble of objects spilling onto the floor. Realising now that I laid traps for myself, need a pair of dress pants for a meeting with the Boss? Choose a bag, any bag! Each one stuffed with photographs and clothes drowning in her smell still after 100 days in a canvas sack. Her Mother wants a particular necklace of hers back? Sure thing! It's under a stack of polaroid pictures which leave me stunned, breath catching in my chest. Perhaps it's in this bag? No, that's the carved wooden rattle I made when she told me she was pregnant. Maybe this one? Wedding pictures. Christ, I lose hours sitting on that floor in the midst of our life together, all mixed up in three kit bags.
When the kid woke her with athletics she'd sit on the deck, legs swinging and watch the fireflies, listening to the cicadas and letting the damp, hot air wrap around her. So many nights that I can retrace my next steps easily: to the water jug in the corner, soak the rag I leave there for this and creep after her, draping it across the back of her neck. Remember the taste of wet curls of hair left pressed against the hot skin, sound of cicadas, swirling glint of fireflies, smell of the dying fire, feel of the wood at the back of my legs. On the best nights the first fat drops of rain and slowly the hammering of a downpour on the tin roofs all around us. Jumping off the deck and lifting her down by the waist, soaked to the skin and slowly the village stirs in the pre-dawn darkness to shriek with the children and wash deliciously with warm water and bars of antiseptic soap.
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