The young man passed it over to his senior who smoked the cannabis, inhaling it fully. "Maybe that was what I needed too. Shouldn't live? Isn't that a bit harsh."
"I'm bad, aren't I."
"No. I think that anyone would feel that way; and if you tell yourself you are bad you will be finding yourself in a deeper fog. You'll be lost in guilt wrestling with yourself. Far better to feel hateful sometimes, appropriate times, and then refine the feeling into thought and understanding."
"What thought?"
"I don't know. It will come. Just accept your feelings as natural, not good but natural, and you'll see things clearer. He passed the joint to his friend."
"One day I'll go there."
"Where?"
"Bangkok. Will you take me?"
"No," said Nawin and the two resumed their silence. To really learn of a being instead of using one to smother the void in amusing noise was an edifying and exhausting endeavor of pure sadness not to be pursued by a man in grief, and he just wanted the intimate stranger to leave.
"She is unhappy—my mother. Lives dazed in a television when she isn't working or taking care of him" said the boy. It was superfluous knowledge that sprayed out with his spit into the cloud with no reaction. "I need to go," the intimate stranger said, and the words, cold as a BTS sky-train, traveled up the rails of his spinal cord in unexpected alarm. Reverberating hollow, the words almost seemed to ache as they battered the inner layers of the walls of his brain. Dogs with furless sores littering the sidewalks now did the same to his thoughts, deformed children begging in the streets pressed against his mind with weighty themes of injustice as had happened in the early days of arriving in Bangkok with his brothers, and he could imagine fruit, meat, and noodle workers at their carts disassembling their concocted makeshift restaurants and returning home weary and with stiff, aching limbs. He had yearned for these words so many times during and immediately after the pain ridden intercourse which had been a violation he had invited upon himself as a solitary old man might invite a society of gangsters and thieves into his home so as to hear human voices reminding him of family—voices other than his own.