The last time I was in Chiang Mai was the strangest moment of all the time I have been there. Maybe I was taken ill and my body was so full of drugs that affected my thinking and judgment, I wasn't sure. But it gave me a surreal effect as I saw myself as a conundrum, the site of inexplicable turmoil, a weightless, wild-eyed sort of creature, slightly touched, prone to desperate inner surges, swoons and soaring thoughts. When someone approached me in a right way, I was open, charming, positively gregarious. Otherwise, I was walled off and taciturn, barely present.

The four days I was in this wonderful city, I was bold and timid, light-footed and clumsy, single-minded and impulsive - a walking, breathing monument to the spirit of contradiction. I was moving in two directions at once. Each day I was there, I was struggling with the pain of my illness. I could live with the pain, I found out, but the effort it called for seemed to drive me ever further into myself, erasing me as a social being. I felt I was turning into a block of wood. And a block of wood is hardly a fitting companion for anyone. I felt better only in solitude, silence and walking. I read voraciously in the silence of the lush greenery, the soothing canals, the balmy weather and the sweet delicious smiles of Thai people.

Chiang Mai is not a big city, and it didn't take long to learn my way around. There was something compulsive about the walks I took, an insatiable urge to prowl, to drift like a ghost among strangers, and after just four days some of the streets were transformed into something wholly personal to me, a map of my inner terrain. And ever since I am back home, each time I close my eyes before going to sleep, I am back in Chiang Mai. As wakefulness dribbled out of me and I descend into semi-consciousness, I would find myself there walking through those same streets. I have no explanation for it. Something important had happened to me there, but I have never been able to pinpoint exactly what it is. Something terrible, I think, some mesmerizing encounter with my own depths, as if in the loneliness of those four days I had looked into the darkness and seen myself for the first time.

Well written. Almost poetic.

Yeah, almost Hunter S. Thompson :-)

@funky house - thank you

@admin - you are too kind

look like you have productive days

reminds me of Aldous Huxleys Doors of Perception..