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Half a dozen industrial fans were blowing in the hostel’s outdoor seating area because there was a dengue fever outbreak in Bangkok. The hope for this urban oasis is the artificial wind tunnel will help to keep mosquitoes away from the backpackers lounging on beanbags, sharing stories and cigarettes. After four days of stolen glances, on my last night in Thailand, she plopped herself down next to me at a table where I was reading, blocking the jet stream of my fan. It would've been easy to peek over and compliment her on the photos she was editing. But I move slow and it didn’t happen. Perhaps she was making progress on them but I was reading the same paragraph in a biography about David Ben-Gurion over and over. She was the one who broke the silence, a snarky comment about an annoying guest, and I hungrily slammed my book shut. We were off and running. Over Changs, she talked about how recently completing a doctorate in physiotherapy. How she wheeled cadavers out of pools of formaldehyde to dissect them and how some people who’d recently lost loved ones had to leave the room. To skip small talk about the weather and go straight to corpses seemed like a fascinating sign. All night I didn’t know her name. The next day, out for khao soi, she told me - one of two I’d always thought about if I ever have a daughter. My flight to India left the next evening. As I was leaving for the airport, she was sitting next to a significantly more attractive Luxembourgian guest at the bar. He and I had chatted a bit so I shook his hand and told him to take care. With her, I also parted with an oddly formal handshake. No phone number swap, no half-assed “let’s keep in touch,” not even a last name. I sensed that she had chosen the suave European she was sitting next to and so I didn’t muster up the courage to ask. And then a redeye across the Bay of Bengal. When I arrived in Chennai, my first time in India, it was vibrant and hectic and sweltering and exciting and all I could concentrate on was this empty stitch in my side. Grasping at straws a week after I left Bangkok, I searched the hostel’s location on Instagram. And I found her. Smiling up from one of the outdoor hammocks in sunglasses and a garish yellow button-down. Like a love-sick middle schooler, I tapped “Follow” and tossed the phone onto the bedspread. It stayed there for hours until I summoned the gumption to grab it and see that she had followed me back and sent a message saying that she’d listened to my record linked in my bio, and that she loved my voice. I squealed. Our journeys ran parallel to each other through the medium of Instagram stories. There were her shots of Cambodian cooking classes and water buffalo rides and mine of Hindu temples and plates of biryani. Somewhere near Hyderabad, I fired off a message asking her if she wanted to join me. A week later, she asked me to join her on an island in the Gulf of Thailand where she was stuck because of choppy seas. Neither of us knew if the other was kidding After a fortnight in India, I had to go back to the States. Every day we swapped messages. It eventually reached a fever pitch more than a month after we met, wishing each other a good night across a dozen time zones and talking about the dreams that we’d had. She knew that I worked remotely and asked if I was coming back to Asia after Christmas. I didn’t need to consult with a lawyer to know that it was a leading question. I jumped at the opportunity. "Yes, of course," I thought. "If you are still there I will follow you to the end of the earth." We settled on meeting in Laos. For her it was an hour-long flight from Hanoi and for me, two visas and 17 hours spent on three planes. The end of the earth might have been closer.