drive home:

first the back-stretch of road from work to the traffic light
skinny burmese men pushing carts on foot
or by pedal bike
motorcycles with side cars full of freezer-burnt or half-melted ice cream
then the mansion on the corner
not done yet
marble tigers and exposed scaffolding
the traffic light is blinking on and off because it's past the time of day when we have to wait for the light to change, we can all just go when we think it's safe which means all of us just go
dodging each other over the blare of karaoke from the korean bbq joint
and then the winding bit of road where the trees and the dogs are denser
and  people burn their trash in piles in front of their tin and bamboo houses.
next is the T where i can go left or right to get home--haven't timed it
but i like the drive through town better, more human someone, to be with all those other people,
so it's left past the temple and the never-stocked tesco
and a straight shot through the traffic lights striping intarakiri road (or is that the one
running away from the border? i can never remember)
and as i sail past the left turn into the muslim part of town
the call to prayer makes me suddenly teary--(i must be exhausted)
and finally a right turn into a broad, undodge-able pothole, a hesitation at the 7-11: do i need anything?
another right at the traffic light, a quick merge, a sharp left turn at the gift shop
and i wind my way down the badly-lit road to the police station--past thick cops on bikes, wearing sunglasses even though it's already dusk--
curve slowly around the detention center where burmese migrant workers sit on the floor
of a big cage that i try not to look at and also try to look at and can't decide which is worse
while avoiding the ditch that's eating into the road, checking over my shoulder
shifting down to neutral
swinging one leg over and heaving open the blue iron gate
and then it's a single burst uphill and i'm home.

Motorcycles.

The July my best friend came to India to meet me, we rode ram-shackle buses and jeeps from Delhi to Manali to Leh and to every tiny village we could find once we got there; we forgot to eat and got too-thin and too dark in the high altitude sun. We drank homebrewed chang when we felt like it, wore sleeveless tops without blinking, learned hilarious catch phrases in as many languages as we could get our hands on ("two mosquitos don't fuck, just like that" triumphing as the most bizarre and wonderful of them all). Inevitably, we befriended two wind-swept Ladakhi dudes over fried noodles and cigarettes, hotel staff with some English under their belts, and drove with them to a festival several hours north. I rode with Champa, a man of few words and awe-inducing cheek bones. Our bike kept breaking down. At one point, the sand beneath us got too deep and we tumbled, softly but not un-painfully, over. I loved every second. The smell of motor oil and dessert, Himalayan temple smoke and petrol, sweat and altitude. I hoped it would never end, that I could hunt for Ladakhi chaam dancing festivals from the back of a motorbike, hands tented over my eyes, forever.

Fast forward five years: my motorcycle is another bill I'm struggling to pay and I never get to be the passenger. In this little city on the border with Burma, I navigate crowded weekend streets, maneuver from my apartment to the 7-11 to Hong Long Grocery to the mechanic to the photocopy shop. My "new" bike is old and acts older--it's nearly impossible to kick start when the engine's cold, it hates third gear, it makes a waooow, waooow, waooow noise that's starting to get on my nerves. You could say that the romance went out of our relationship, except that it was never there.

But. Every now and then, I leave town--to drive my friend to the bus station, to search for a cheaper gas station, to wind pointlessly through corn fields and rice paddies and feel, temporarily, untethered--and I see the murky crest of mountains on the horizon, let up on the break, and entertain a stirring of something, a feeling like I'm about to laugh or cry.

Here's something I'd like to know: do motorcycles still breed equal parts black smoke and happiness in the mountains of Ladakh? I hope there's a girl without a sense of obligation, of genuine fear, straddling the back of an Enfield with her eyes closed, hands lifted in the air, fingers spread, sun so-hot on her neck, wondering where she's going but satisfied with any answer, satisfied just by asking.

Not morning.

Saturday at 12:57 pm in Mae Sot. Still in my pajamas. House cleaned, coffee drank, lots of quiet except for the street noise--too-big trucks and small dog fights. Almost casual in their violence towards each other.

This town isn't big enough to to be big and (of course) not small enough to be small. Going on six months here and I still wonder what this place is about. Last night, I drank watered down whiskey and coke with a woman I met in India and a table-full of her Burmese friends. There's a new string of bars lining the suburban-wide street that connects one side of the highway to the other. People are calling it Mae Sot, Sukhumvit, to pretend we live in more of a city than we actually do. But then again, the Thai women in high-waisted short-shorts, the neat mess of motorcycles against the sidewalk, the three-piece band in skinny, skinny jeans all do hint at a kind of urbanism I didn't know existed here. See? Six months and I'm still not sure what kind of town this is.

I'm here to teach twenty-four people from Burma about community development. We over-use the word 'community' in the classroom to the point where I don't know what it means anymore. My students come from community-based organizations along the Thai-Burma border. We are currently undergoing data collection for a community development project, to be implemented over the next few months in a local, migrant community. We prepare for our community visits, we meet with community leaders, we identify characteristics of communities.

Guess what? Some of the members of the communities we're working in don't speak to each other. They don't share a common language. Or an interest in speaking. Some of them say, this isn't a community at all. This isn't my land. The Thai government doesn't recognize us. I'm a day laborer. Look somewhere else. Some of the community members are the wrong religion, the wrong colors, came from the wrong place in Burma for the wrong reasons. They made too much money, they didn't make enough money. Trying to understand these people and the places they occupy verges on impossible--for me. Luckily, it's not my job. I just need to pass on what I know about getting to know people, about actually talking and actually listening and resisting the urge to oversimplify. On good days, it's not so hard. On better days, I love it.

From years of moving to new places I know nothing about, I've learned it's the little things that make you truly happy. Clean sheets, good take-out, evenings free. I try to cultivate familiarity so that I can better guide my students (and myself) through the unknown. Of course, the world is so small and there's familiarity even in strange, uncomfortable places. Sitting on a bamboo floor, talking (in translation) with an elderly Karen Buddhist man, I saw in his face--in its expressions more than its features--elements of Tibetan faces, of Tibetan people I've known and loved. Extended gazes, pronounced blinking at the end of a sentence--I've seen these before. Once, when I was twenty years old, I sat on a hard, flat cushion on the floor of an upstairs apartment at a Tibetan medical clinic in India, drinking tea and looking awkwardly at the woman in front of me. Nine years later, I still call that woman mother and I love her like it's true.

Sometimes I think: if I just kept sitting on that bamboo floor, maybe something would grow. Syllables would distinguish themselves into words and I'd piece them together and remember that learning a language is more ambiguous than any high school Spanish teacher will ever tell you. It's not as if one day you don't know and the next day you do. There is so much in-between space to live and work in. If I sat and sat and sat there on that bamboo floor, maybe one day I'd reach a point where I wouldn't understand the community-that-is-not-a-community of which the old man is (not) the leader, but I'd understand how much I don't understand, and all the complexities and un-nameables would open up before me, and I'd be able to finally ask the right questions.