Living With Pain

and no short stories (but that has to be okay)

this post mentions suicide & suicidal ideation)

I have been in pain lately. Truthfully, my pain started years ago, when I was on a trip to South and Southeast Asia, beginning in Nepal. I’d just graduated from my MFA program (Was I feeling pain in that last year? Is that when my symptoms started? Maybe) and, although I didn’t have the money, I booked a ticket to Kathmandu and planned a four month trip through Nepal, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since I was a teenager, and never did, because I was scared to travel alone.

In Nepal, after mad-dashing for the visa line, I stayed at the Pleasure Home Motel, where I slept for hours drenched in the smell of incense and the sounds of guests arriving and departing one floor below. I could speak Hindi, not fluently but enough. The next morning, I immediately headed to Pokhara and then up into the mountainous jungle where I’d meet a Gurung family, whose mud hut was tucked into a tiny, cup-shaped village, surround…