Yet we built and shared a trust. We were so far from our homes, for one thing; and for another -- if I may pose an opposite as a cause -- we didn't trust. We had nothing to go on except faith, no mutual foreknowledge of faults and dangers, only innocence toward each other. We met full of lightness, free of matter: I want to call it a Mobility of Souls. Our reasons for coming to Angkor surely differed, but we both heard its numinous call, and that made us both Believers, both devotees, unclothed by any doubt. We seemed to take a great life-leap together, from immaturity's fear of the vast unknown up to the philosopher's high sanctum: have blind faith, but beware what can be seen.
How easily some bonds come to be. I was thinking after Lijsa went back to Holland that I had just failed -- dismally, catastrophically -- after two years of negotiations, conducted in our beds and kitchens and cars, in the comfort of our towns and our most familiar coffeehouses and bars, out with close friends and alone in dark rooms, to forge a trust with Eve. Yet Lijsa and I achieved it in an effortless half-day in Cambodia.
And speaking of Eve, here she comes again. Having extracted my assurances that I was "safe," now she wanted to leap right into friendship. An email laundry-list of questions: Would I come home as planned or stay longer? What would I do, where would I go, upon my return? Wait tables? Go back to Texas? Would I like to get together over Thanksgiving? Some news about her life in New York, and Be Careful. (Oh the irony of those two words from her!) I made no response. I had Angkor. I had Lijsa. I might have been falling in love with Lijsa, although I was not, and knew I was not.
She did the right thing when I insinuated that she should take me back to Amsterdam. I would have gone. I would have flown with her to Bangkok, haggled the price of a ticket on Khao San Road, and with my single word of Dutch, begun a new life in the Netherlands: Sneeuwscheuvel, I would tell people, and smile. Why not? We'd already seen Angkor, we were headed for the Killing Fields and S-21; we would navigate and sweat and bathe together, stand sentry during the intestinal skirmishes. Milton's "sweet of daily life" would have been easy. I would have followed Lijsa home, and not because of Lijsa but because I had become a follower: I keep saying that where we travel we see ourselves, and I have to mean me first and foremost. Lijsa was dazzling and lucid and so very true. She reflected me plainly, as I may have done for her, without distortion or slant. She was a Leonid shower of light in my darkness.
