That woman on the boat

Morning. I am sitting on this old boat in Bangkok. I know I am not alone coz granddad must be here with me today because he did not go to work. We have decided to take the boat and get lost on these canals. I know I should be more interested in the landscape, surroundings, temples and the history. But I can only look at her, while I am clatching my bag full of melon and papaya.

She is wearing a sage green linen jacket that seemed to hold her together like a second skin, her back straight and her face towards the sun. A smile and a demeanor I can only understand now, of a woman who slept with a man who made her skin glow. Add Ray-Ban sunglasses with golden rims that catch the sunlight. Her long blonde hair is swept into a chignon, and her blue eyes shine from behind the lenses with a clarity I couldn’t name at fifteen. She is German, I think: her features, her stance, her tanned skin, spoke of that northern precision and strength.

She smokes a cigar! Of all the temples of this old Bangkok, I remember this woman, on a boat, smoking a cigar: calmly, deliberately, and carries herself with an aura of maturity I had never known. Grounded, sturdy, fully grown in a way I could only perceive from a distance, but that made my young self ache with admiration.

On this boat, for a fleeting moment, she becomes a guidepost in my life, a model of adulthood I longed to embody. I didn’t know then how, or why, or what I would become, of course, but in her presence, I understood that there were ways to be in the world that were strong, deliberate, and luminous.