That Always Happens

By Natalie Mills · Estimated Reading Time: 5 Minutes

It is our third night in Asia, and I make a friend at the bar the way friends are made here—one foreigner sees another and starts talking. He sits by me as I wait for my food. I can tell that he is going to talk to me; he is careful not to disturb the bench we sit on at the bar so he will be allowed a few words.

Behind us, his motorbike is parked on the road. My bike is in the grass nearby, tipped over because the kickstand is broken. I borrowed it to get food, and I want to go back and eat my dinner on the beach as the sun sets.

“Been here long?” He tilts his chin at me. 

“In Thailand, three days. At this bar, about five minutes,” I joke. He wants to talk, and I cannot stop him. He thuds his feet onto the bench’s railing, letting his full weight move down into his ankles. I return the question.

“Almost twenty years,” he responds, as if he is rehearsing for a test and hoping he can remember the correct answer.

Most white people I see here are tourists, but later I will recognize other long-timers by what I learn from my companion tonight. They are the gaunt, tanned faces who walk the streets with too much purpose or too little, exhausted from living outside of their own countries, or perhaps Thailand draws tired people to herself. 

Next to me, the man wears long cargo shorts with fraying cuffs and a t-shirt with the name of a bar on it—not this bar but another one like it, a local bar in a small beach town. His body looks to be late forties, but the sun has coaxed his face into looking a decade older than that.

I ask him why he moved here and why he stayed so long.

“Have you ever had a coincidence or déjà vu or serendipity so strong that you start to think it isn’t fate—it’s you?”

It began when he was in his twenties, he tells me. The whole decade blurs now, a series of perfectly painted dots that have been smeared with the back of a careless hand. 

“It started in Asia, here in Thailand. I heard a phrase on a TV show, some business jargon I learned as part of an advertising course in college. The day before I heard it on TV, I had been trying to remember the phrase, but I couldn’t grab onto it. I was crossing a bridge, thinking about how I couldn’t remember that term. It wasn’t important, but it seemed like I was losing a piece of what I used to know. Then the next day, I heard it in the TV show. There it was, almost like the universe felt me searching for it and handed it to me.”

“I told my friend what happened, and he said, ‘That always happens.’ He just wanted to shut me up, but his comment got in my head. Does it always happen? The coincidences, the pieces of information that you reach for and life hands back to you? Then it started happening a lot, like each question I sent out would be answered, bread upon the water coming back again. After that, I started looking for the coincidences, and I saw them everywhere, almost like a path that the universe was setting out for me.”

He looks up, watching a menu pinned to the cork board behind the bar lift in the wind and then settle back down again. We are sitting at the bar, and our feet hang down below us. His legs are muscular and tanned from walking in the sun. They dangle like roasted meat in the small windows of the street-side carts. My legs are white from the midwest winter and feel loose below me as I look at his.

Behind us, the evening slinks away. We have talked through the last of the light. My order is up, but I am not ready to leave. I crack open the bag of food and pull out my french fries. I pour ketchup on a napkin and dip a fry in it. The ketchup clings to the fry, warm and sticky, the taste of summer lunches and extra napkins at fast food restaurants. It does not fit the humid scent of Thailand, but I am glad for it. I taste American ketchup in Thailand just as I feel July warmth in January. 

My companion sweats in the white lights of the restaurant, despite the cool night sinking in around us and the lone fan oscillating in one corner. He sweats and does not watch me.

“The first signs were so small, they were hardly anything. I would see them and think: that happens all the time, just like my friend said. Then they got bigger, and I couldn’t take them. A friend of mine announced he was moving to a new company a week after I first heard of the company at a dinner party. The old song that I loved was playing at a bar the night after I talked to my sister about it. The amount of money I said I needed was exactly what the next day’s newspaper said I could make. Some of it, I could chalk up to coincidence. Or the way the brain works. Or smart advertising.”

I laugh, but he does not.

“It got too weird to handle. I switched my thinking: instead of, ‘How is this happening?’, I asked, ‘Why? Why is this happening? Why these things? Why is it that I can’t remember most people from high school but I always think of that one girl? Why did my dog die the day after I got mad at him for peeing on the floor and wishing he was dead? Why did I lose my job the day after I talk about wishing I could be fired so I could move to Thailand?’”

“So that’s why you’re back in Thailand?” I ask. 

He shrugs as if the weight is many places, not just one. The dark has closed in behind us, swathing our bikes in night and pushing all the insects toward the light coming off the bar. 

“I came here for a lot of reasons, but most of all because I knew if I stayed in America, I would die.” 

He meets my eyes with a challenge. I widen my eyes, impressed, knowing that is the reaction he wants. “Woah, why?”

“All the signs were there. The coincidences started, and then the universe kept handing things to me—answers to questions, updates on friends, a different job, a better apartment. But there was something malicious behind it all. There was a dead mouse in the cupboard when I moved into my apartment when the landlord said he’d never seen one in the building. My friend joined the army and died in a fluke accident. He tried to convince me to join up with him. It was like all the coincidences were my currency with the universe. And I had used them all up.”

I don’t know what else to say. “That sucks, man.”

The mosquitos have found my legs. A moth beats itself to death on the lamp above us. A light of a car circles the gravel driveway leading up to the bar. I cough and unstick my sweating legs from the bench. He sees me ready to leave and raises his glass an inch toward the light, a salute to our finished conversation. I stand up to leave, but lean back, prompted by my midwestern conviction that maybe crazy people should be told they are crazy.

“Do you really believe you would have died if you stayed in America?”

He pauses over his drink, letting beads of condensation form around his fingers. “I’ll never know, will I? Because I left, and now I’m here.”

He sets the drink back down and wipes his fingers on his shorts. I give him a brief smile, and pick up my bike from the grass. I leave him behind me, his bright pink shirt under the glaring lamp where another moth drums a slow death.

I will never know this, but I am the second person today to ask him if he would have died if he had stayed in America. This is Wednesday. On Thursday, his motorcycle will skid under a truck, and he will die in Thailand at age forty-seven.

✷

Story by Natalie Mills · Photo by Becca Daulton

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