Bah

Received an e-mail today from a Filipina we met in Bangkok. I sat staring at the screen and came up with nothing to say. I thought, what was the use. It’s not as if we’ll see each other again. A few years ago, I was out exploring a temple in Cambodia when someone came up to me and asked for my name. He spoke in broken but comprehensible English. You can be anyone you want to be in a different country, so I was Ana. We exchanged email addresses. I scribbled his down on a sheet of paper and lost it. I wonder why we even bother trying to connect with strangers. “Be ahead of all parting” starts Rilke in one of his sonnets to Orpheus.