February 22, 2025

My dearest,

We are back in Bangkok, for the first time in nearly a year. Seems just like yesterday when we were still staying here.

Especially Ari where everything feels so familiar when we return there the day after we land. The same flight of steps at Exit 3 of the BTS station, down to the small alley peppered with food stalls. We reach the end and there is Guss Damn Good on our left and Phumjai Crêpe across the street.

We cross Soi Ari 1, past Aribica and our usual 7-Eleven and turn into yet another alley, where you used to buy Thai style taufoofa (extra spicy ginger soup!) in the evenings, and we’d have a choice of croissants at Kenn’s or tonkatsu at Kasa.

It is a day of eating, really: pad krapao from Kod Krapao and coffee at Progress. We meet your former colleagues Maprang and Araya at Yellow Lane.

While catching up, you tell them how I have been listening to so much T-pop recently. Daou and Offroad, LYKN and Project JASP.ER. Jeff Satur and 4EVE. Tilly Birds and Three Man Down. Getsunova and Indigo.

You tell them I have been listening to T-pop boy bands like BUS, that I even watched their survival competition. You tell them, and you tell Hong later that evening, and to Ping and his girlfriend Ik on Friday.

It’s true, of course. Perhaps listening to T-pop is a way for me to stay connected to our former home and our former expat life. Or maybe I just like the music.

Either way I have been transformed. Travel and living elsewhere do that to us. Changes us, in little ways and without us noticing.

Unless our partner does. You have always been “observative”, as you put it. You are, my boy, narak tee sood, as the Thais say it. Yes you are.

Yours, ever and always.