Noppawan had her chance to go with him. He had asked repeatedly.
He had tacitly exhorted (mostly with his eyes) but she had refused
him. Maybe she needed him to command her presence. Maybe in this
nebulousness of strong selfishness and altruism called a personal
relationship, so immediate and personal like finding oneself enveloped
in smoking and fiery dust, she needed constant reminders that he cared
about her more than any other entity selfishly and altruistically. That
would be the woman in her if there were such a woman.
He tried to contemplate what love was like for normal people. It
was surely a dust storm one invented in one's mind to escape loneliness
but then it became intertwined in more neediness and consciousness of
the other's feelings and thoughts so as not to be vanquished to
aloneness. An individual who was able to overcome the grief of the
loss of dopamine in the ephemeral and moribund high of being in love
would cling to his former pleasure-inducer as a source of meaning in
life's vicissitudes. He and Noppawan had done the same but they were
less like individuals finding themselves separately cast onto lifeboats
in an ocean of random waves for they found oceans of thoughts within
themselves that seemed more navigable to solid chunks of reality. They
needed each other less; or so he thought.
Thai women generally had obsequious crying bouts in their rafts,
but Noppawan, he argued, was not a woman. She was female without
womanity. She was a female who advocated overcoming petty human
existence for a love of ideals, compassion, and the attempts at
understanding the human predicament. He couldn't see into the future
to know if he would be returning to Thailand anytime soon to be peered
at through his wife's thick dark framed glasses. At present there were
only the wills of three individuals cowardly seeking meaning for
themselves in a unit. There were only these socialized wills rolling
along on a road in marginal darkness under the specious assumption that