Same Same but Different

Chapter Three

I fell asleep fast and I fell asleep hard. You would have thought I actually took that Ambien. The sleep I had been longing for since the tires touched Asian ground found me almost effortlessly.

Slowly, I woke up. The light breaking in through the weird, not quite open-concept, window things at the top of the room was more than morning and had started to tug at my eyelids. Due to the jetlag fog, it took a few moments to remember where I was. I was not at home. I was not in a hostel in Rome nor hotel in Mozambique. I was in my old apartment in Cambodia. My old apartment. It smelled warm and familiar.

I sighed and as soon as a did a large hand flopped onto my stomach.

What the hell?

I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and as I did the events of the previous evening came crashing in on me. I turned my head to my right and, sure enough, there was Chris Evans. His was on his side, curled toward me, and his mouth was ajar. He breathed heavily, but didn't quite snore, clearly still very deep in his sleep. I looked down at his hand, flat on my stomach. In the faint light I could still see how perfectly manicured it was. His nails were shiny and short. His skin supple and soft looking. I didn't dare touch his hand. I just stared at it, completely in shock of what was happening. What had happened. This was all too unbelievable. Even if I hadn't signed a random piece of paper promising to never speak of this moment, who would believe me anyway? This was outlandish.

With a turn of my head, I looked at his face. The shadows made his cheekbones look sharp. The lower half of his face was completely hidden in darkness and facial hair. That I had to actually tell myself not to touch. It looked so soft. All my experiences with facial hair had not been soft. Most five o'clock shadows left my lips and cheeks a rashy red. In spite of all this, he wasn't cute when he slept. He was a total mouth breather. I couldn't contain my smirk. Not completely perfect now, are you?

I followed him on Twitter. I admired the heck out of this man. His outspokenness on important political issues was what drew me in. In my bouts of practical unemployment, I found myself in need of healthcare. The prices were insane. I started researching, looking for ways it could be improved. I looked at socialized medicine, like any good millennial such as myself should. In the end, I just ended up registering as a Democrat, much to the chagrin of my Republican parents. Being an artist with weird hours, I was readily available to door knock or hand out flyers for certain candidates. During all this I started to follow all the left-leaning celebrities. Though I would occasionally roll my eyes and think about how they surely never worried about how they would afford birth control or their yearly pap-smear, I still enjoyed the intelligent commentary. And it definitely helped that Evans was easy on the eyes.

I looked at him again. Why are you in Cambodia of all places? This wasn't a celebrity destination. Thailand. That's where I imagined the elite to go. I'd seen the pictures of private villas on the pristine beaches. Surely there were similar accommodations in Sihanoukville, but I hadn't seen them on my weekend beach excursion.

I vaguely remembered another celebrity, though I couldn't remember who, posted pictures on their Instagram about a trip to Siem Reap. I could see private pools and pictures of the temples. I supposed the draw of Angkor Wat worked on all classes of people.

When I first attended training for my teaching gig, they gave me a crash course in Cambodian history. I knew bits and pieces about Nixon and the Vietnam war. I knew America didn't exactly do right by the Cambodians during all that. I also knew the name Pol Pot from my world history classes in high school. Or maybe it was college. Who knows. The name and the Khmer Rouge were stories I had read. I hadn't been in Cambodia two days and my principal was taking me to the Killing Fields and Genocide Museum. As Robert guided me through the museum, he pointed out the smallest things that chipped away at my embarrassing American knowledge of what happened. I looked at the photos of each of the victims, so perfectly set to take perfect pictures, as tears streamed down my face. This was the type of stuff that happened before my lifetime, not during it. I was born during this horrible regime. I stared at the ceiling and contemplated swinging by the actual killing fields before leaving town to scatter Faith's ashes. It was walking those paths, past the skull filled stupa, that I tripped on an actual human bone. Bone fragments, I was told, were still everywhere. The monsoon must have washed up that one.