In the moment, it was hard to understand the rush of emotions we were both experiencing in such a short period of time. We reached a level of openness that would usually take months to get to back home. In a week’s span, we found ourselves living together, sharing a bathroom, and arguing over what to eat for dinner. We had a morning routine. Daniel described the speed of our romance as a relationship bootcamp. I felt like I’d found myself in an arranged marriage. One night, we sat on a dimly lit porch watching the mosquitos dance to the music we shared with each other. Daniel liked heavy metal jams, and while I never grew an affinity for that genre, I considered adding them to my Spotify playlist for him.
Perhaps our expedited relationship was a consequence of heightened vulnerability travelers are plagued with regularly. On the road, you’re forced to take down the walls you’ve built around yourself, cemented by your own fears and insecurities. Daniel and I couldn’t hide behind our jobs, friends, exes and self-imposed expectations during the usually drawn-out indecisive dating phase. Our relationship lived in a parallel universe where the unfolding of intimacy wasn’t bound to the constraints of time and preconceived milestones. It also wasn’t tied to a committed future. We had the freedom to move with whatever came our way, unattached to the anxiety of the future and the responsibilities of our past.
I found this all very exciting. I liked being able to be myself, but also an idealized version of who I wanted to be, with someone who didn’t know the me from back home. He had never seen me with my hair straightened, or with makeup on. He had never seen how I laughed with my closest friends, or how I dealt with stress from the demands of everyday life. He only knew the free-spirited, backpacker me — a version of myself that felt right in the moment, but wasn’t exactly conducive to Western society, or so I thought. [...]
In hindsight, a part of me wished I had never followed Daniel to Vietnam and then to Cambodia. A part of me believed he was right in being reluctant of intimacy. If we had left our affair in Thailand, I told myself, our memories together would have been warmer. I would have always thought of him as “the one who got away.”
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