Epiphany

It came to me this afternoon, as I was finishing up my day of serious, dedicated writing at the coffeeshop.

On the day that I had my stroke, maybe even at the exact moment it began, I was reading my favorite book, "Swimming to Cambodia," by Spaulding Gray. He's a great monologist and actor who appears in Roland Joffe's film the Killing Fields, which is shot in Thailand but "takes place" in Cambodia during the Vietnam war and the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Watch it, it's excellent.
Anyway, he's in Thailand, searching for his "perfect moment" on a Thai beach, eating mushrooms and throwing up in the sand and thinking about life and why he can't get lost in the water and why he can't get married and why the Thais have so much fun and how Marilyn Monroe died. It is, as I said, my favorite book, stream of consciousness beautiful.
So now, I'm writing my book. People ask me all the time if Thailand has anything to do with it, and until today, until my epipany, I've said no, but it apparently, somehow, has had something to do with it.
The day of my stroke was the day the tsunami fucked up the beaches in Thailand. The beach that one mr. Gray had visited and tripped and puked on in STC. The second question my dad asked me when I woke up was if I could remember talking abou t the tsunami the morning we left the house. The first question was "how are you," and the answer to it was "what?" and the answer to the second question was also, "what?"
So the next part of all of this is that Gray died while I was in the hospital. He too suffered from brain trauma, a result of a car accident in the UK. He committed suicide and was found right round the time I got out of the hospital. His book, Thailand, my stroke... it sounds silly and fucked up and all sorts of crazy to make connections in this way, I know. I do. But somehow it feels like there's something there. Closure? On that part of my life, the life I had before the stroke? The life that ended that same morning for me and thousands of others? I got to go on living, but not as I once had. Finality? Kyle and I planned this trip sometime in the first year after I got out of the hospital (I think) and now it's finally happening. Closure in that, and what the past two years have meant in a connection sustained? I set a goal of completing my book by March first not because I knew for sure that I'd be leaving for Thailand, but because March felt right. I could have said "July," or "next September," and any other month. But this is working our perfectly.
Perfect. I'm always looking for a perfect moment in my life, without knowing what that perfect moment is or what perfection might even be, although it becomes in the weirdest of ways, and not always in what others see as perfect. Of course I've been hoping for a "perfect moment" of my own, on some beach while there, but it probably won't be his beach, becuse in an interview years later he said he went back and it was commercialized and fucked up, and I have no idea what it will be like. I don't know what I'm looking for.
Maybe that's the message I was supposed to get today. I don't have to know, it doesn't have to make any sense now, but at some point it will?

(click here to buy the book. DO it!! please)