It’s kinda like that bar on tv.
Except it’s located somewhere around kilometer 37 an hour outside Phnom Penh in the middle of nowhere Cambodia.
There’s no fancy bar stools waiting for you, but they offer blue plastic chairs that are stacked double for extra strength and tied together with rusted wires. There aren’t any cocktails and the only percentage you’re questioning is for the amount of sweetened condensed milk poured into your coffee.
I wasn’t planning on meeting him.
We were only out to run errands, eat a little riverside food and head back to the emptied hotel for some much needed time of rest with the accompaniment of odd junk food and a movie.
But he was waiting for us when we walked outside, sitting sheepishly in his faded red angry birds t-shirt as if he had no idea that he had already stolen my heart, his deep brown eyes darting quickly away from ours so as not to stare too much.
Faith wasn’t my strength.
My heart didn’t understand it and my thoughts couldn’t comprehend an idea that was overused and underlived. It presented itself to me as a code word only used by those sitting in the cushioned pews with the well kept Bible resting orderly beside them.
And it wasn’t a part of my life.
So I walked and believed that I wasn’t a woman with enough faith, a woman who wasn’t spiritual or holy enough to stand firm on all that word represented. It was just an idea that I would hide in the closet until I desperately needed it or could finally understand it.
It had been almost 11 months since I’d jumped the big pond with 50 other people. 11 months since I’ve tagged teamed back to back flights across the world with an 11 hour bus ride. 11 months since I’d been on the world race.
Yet here I was again, loading up my backpack with a few pair of clothes and a hammock to add to the ever-growing city within our squad; a bit more packing savvy and a lot less worried with the thought of not having enough.
And I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t hard. Leaving this time brought a heaviness and a sadness beneath the excitement. The life I had come to love was about to change again and letting go felt a lot harder.
But the sign on the unlocked door said follow Me.
Perversion. Corruption. Trickery. Lies. Immorality. Lust. Sex. Darkness. Death.
It all hung in the air as I walked along the main strip of Phuket, Thailand known as Bangla Road, smiling politely as the words “no thank you” escaped from my lips and my eyes stared into the person holding a border line explicit graphic flyer in front of my face to advertise a show named after the game I played growing up with my family in the room above our garage; ping pong will never be the same for me. As I looked down the street through the herd of cattle walking ahead, around and behind me, all waiting to follow the leader to the next big thing or the quickest path off the cliff to their destruction, I accepted the reality that one “no thank you” might not be enough.
I had just stepped out of the taxi.
the unscripted wing 