Page 46 of Status Undefined
“I don’t care. I want out of here. Give me my phone!”
“Maybe talk to the monk first?”
I looked at her. Her calm voice grated on me and I ran. She called out to try and stop me. I got to the bamboo gate and tried to open it, but it was locked. It wasn’t very high, so I jumped over it and ran away from there as fast as I could. After a while I stopped to sit on a rock by the ocean to catch my breath. It was already dark, and I had no idea how to find a place to sleep. I had no phone, no map, and no hope of a taxi passing by – there weren’t many of those in Koh Phangan. Despite my predicament, watching the waves soothed me – for the first time in ages. I wasn’t aware of how much time had passed, when a voice said:
“I think you forgot this?” It was the bald, orange-robed monk. He handed me my phone.
“How did you find me?” I was startled.
“You’re not the first one to run.” He laughed in an unthreatening way.
“I’m not going to force you to come back, don’t worry. I say thatto everyone who runs. It’s not a prison, but we are responsible for you and want the best for you. The process you’ve been through is one of the hardest that a person can experience. It makes sense that you’d want to escape. But now that I’ve told you what I tell everyone – you must tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Who or what are you attached to? Who or what can’t you break free of?”
I told him. Everything. He listened for half an hour, maybe an hour. I was hoarse from not having spoken for so long, but when I started to talk I couldn’t stop.
When I finished there were a few minutes where the only sound was the breaking of the waves, as if he was waiting to see if there was more I needed to get off my chest, “We were all nomads as children. We didn’t have to leave the room to wander. All we needed was the knowledge that there was somewhere we could come back to. Do you have a safe place you can return to? Do you have someone who will embrace you and tell you everything is alright even when you have fallen?”
“No. Because if I go back to the safe place, I may not be able to leave again.”
“It’s not physical movement that makes a nomad. It’s a state of mind. You can even go to places that aren’t on the planet. All you have to do is use your imagination.”
“But I’m a digital nomad. My essence, my work, is to move from place to place.”
“I don’t know how much you listened to me over the week, but change is constant. Our cells are replaced all the time; people, animals, and plants all die and are reborn. The child grows into an adult, the neurons in the brain change, energy is always moving. I know that you were once certain of being a digital nomad. Do you know who you are now? Don’t block your consciousness from the constant change that is happeningin you. Every single day, ask yourself: Who am I? And expect a different answer every time. Who are you right now? Let the answer come to you on its own.”
In complete silence we both looked out at the ocean for a long while, and then the answer flew into my head.
“I am pointless love. I’m full of love that has nowhere to go, wasted energy, lost in the wilderness with no direction or purpose.”
“There’s no such thing as wasted energy. When there’s no reason for it to be yours, it doesn’t die – it just moves on. If it’s yours, it must be there for a reason, one you haven’t given up on. But it’s time for you to decide: quit or push ahead?”
“I’m not a quitter.” It was my mantra – I didn’t even think before I said it.
“Sometimes people think quitting is easier, so we perceive it as laziness and weakness. But giving up is only easy with things that we never grew attached to. When we are attached, quitting is actually the harder option. There’s nothing more difficult than picking apart a knot that we ourselves have worked too hard to tighten. If you stayed on, you’d experience that truth for yourself – that you’re constantly changing, there is no permanent self, and then you’d understand how terrible it is for your soul to get attached to a definition, a label you adopted a long time ago.”
I pondered his words for long minutes, maybe hours – hard to keep track in Koh Phangan. But the monk kept sitting with me as if I were the most important thing in the world. And then I remembered – because that’s what silence can do.
“A last question, Mr. Monk”
“Yes?”
“Have you ever sold a Ferrari?”
He looked at me and I was afraid he was annoyed. But then he laughed, long and loud. I joined him, relieved.
January 28
I was at the beach where the Full Moon Party happens, the one everyone told me I had to go to in Thailand. But there was no full moon and very few people. The sun hadn’t set, and it was hot under the umbrella, but I didn’t want to sit in a closed space. After the silent week I’d been through I wanted human conversation, no screens or messages. I was sick of silence, of remembering and thinking.
I uploaded a story to Instagram, announcing where I was and inviting everyone to come. I’d never done that, but desperate times call for desperate measures. I was interested to find out how many followers I had in Koh Phangan and how many would take the time to come. I was also a little afraid of them coming. Would they still follow me if they knew me outside of Instagram? Amit once thought I was shallow because of Instagram, and I wondered if he’d been right. Maybe I was, and they were about to find out. It never hurt my feelings when he said it, but I had worried it would make him keep his distance. In the end, Instagram really did put distance between us.
Keren immediately sent a message with a crying emoji, and she wasn’t the only one. I looked around, as if someone was about to come running, but all I saw was a rainbow pride flag that I hadn’t noticed before. I started to absorb that nobody was coming and I should just have an early night, but then I saw two smiling girls approaching. I looked back to make sure they were coming toward me and not someone else (that would be embarrassing). There was no one behind me.
“OMG!”
