I've been holding onto this for a bit - not certain what to do with it, nor what it is. As I'm getting ready to hit the road again, I'm purging - the clutter in my desk drawers, the extra odds and ends, the useful bits that should be shared, the unfinished ones bouncing in my memory. So here is this - this something.

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It was the second day down the Mekong and the God of Thunder was asleep on the back of the boat. She was led into the familiar arms of strangers as time became an amalgamated series of passing images, a jerky blur of archetypes as saturation precluded significance and sensation procured sentiment. She was guided by the music.

The Three Graces were getting sunburnt on the bow as Apollo flicked his cigarette ash into the river, silver rings glinting as he grinned. Huckleberry Finn, sent home from the war in a body bag of opiates, threatened to jump. Assorted prodigals wandered, swapping routes while cheerfully swigging Beer Lao. Conversations were joined mid-sentence, introductions had been unnecessary. The boat docked in time for the theater, the chorus dispersed through the audience, masks beneath their skin – but the pantheon had arrived cohesive. She sat in their court, late through that night at the long wooden table overflowing with beer and spilling languages. She was one foot in the water, having leapt above her head, a dryad in the sea. She couldn't place herself in their midst, nor place them in relation to her, but she had joined them eagerly from her perch on the railing as she surrendered her chronology to the Mekong.

Throwing her pack before her body she'd been pulled into a cluster of friends and watched the telephone lines give way to trees as they drove beyond the concrete to a table heaped with vegetables. It was the calm that healed but the love, cooked into the food and flowing throughout, that compelled her to stay. Batik painting followed cooking lessons and when she ran out of classes, she insinuated herself into others' projects. Sweat drips down the her spine, mixing with the earth, as they dance the clay for an oven; her orange-stained feet go to plaster the walls of a house; her forehead is steaming in the sunshine as she gathers tomatoes and exhales the sunsets above a valley which offered a view that snagged her gaze, time and again, long after she left. She is leaving the farm by pickup truck, bouncing through banana groves, uncertain if it is the aching lack of purpose or the nagging soreness of erosion that forces her onward. Umbrellas neglected their duty; no shade given. Instead, they played with the temptation of flight and she gives into the dare.

Another pickup truck is taking her away from her hammock and to a beach where the sun is never seen except at dawn. A year passes past on a surf soaked in writhing bodies. She is skipping from bucket to bucket on her tippy-toes, tipped into a bottle of sangsom she topples to the floor and heads to the jungle to dance. She loses her focus to the rhythm and her sanity to the lyrics. The jungle claimed her underwear that night but now she is returning – coffee beans and muesli falling out of the motorbike, bouncing on a dirt street. The motorbike is steady but the driver is not; the driver is unconvinced but she is in need; she has once more hitched a ride, riding on the back as she is clinging to the back of yet another.

She is dancing shoe-less on a beach, having come into her own in a reggae bar with triangle pillows on the floor. Picking her way across a muddy street; she has fallen into a Bornean swamp and the leeches have taken her camera. She has tripped and has slidden under the boat, she has fallen off the balcony but she has missed the rock; she is muddy but fine, as she tells the asking audience – fine but surprised at being asked. She is surprised but she has learned how to answer.

"Tik cha, sister?"

It was four in the morning and she was huddled over coffee and granola; pre-verbal and doubtful – but perfectly fine. She gestured to the pot of coffee on the stove and waved at a second cup, which was accepted gratefully but briefly. "Sister ready go Dhading! Didi get clothes now!" She is sister and Didi is a tiny woman with a worried frown that peers out her smiling eyes and echoes in her laugh. She was taking Didi home to Dhading – or is Didi taking her home? Having choreographed the plan to candlelight, she sails on cups of tea to a relative sea, yawning weeks of sleepless nights to end after daal bhat and rice wine, bathed and baptised on the roadside as teenage nieces poured water over her head and pondered at her hair and "clear eyes". A three year-old played peek-a-boo, fascinated but unwilling to approach, braver yet than another toddler, who, horrified by her ghostliness went wide-eyed and screaming to his mother's skirts.

A celebrity monstrosity before with an entourage that laughed and grabbed as only children would, having not yet perverted physiognomy nor lost the beauty of physiology, she is unscarred. They let her unbraid their hair as they braided hers. She listens to the happy watoto of Kikatiti cry themselves to sleep, having bought her way into the black market with jelly beans, palmed bean for maize kernel. It was their fingertips stroking the hair on her arms that she remembered later – as well as the smells, the over-saturation of overcrowding, the press of body odors clambering into the dalla-dallas and the ancient dalla-dalla lacking brakes or suspension that dangles off a cliff side as the children cling; they clung like the children in Tachilek would, the young boys in monks' robes grabbing at her bag and reaching hands into her pockets uninvited with contradictory gazes out their eyes.

"Sistah, sistah!" another set of children calls to her, these ones from balconies rather than sunflower fields, with eyes a different shape, but the same school uniforms.

She is sister to them all but she cannot sing their songs; they wanted to sing hers and so she transcribed David's secret chord, line by line, in an empty stone office. She had been sat alone in the corner watching them dance, not trying; she had been listening for the tune and, in frustration at her lack of pitch, abandoned her ears. Her ears, so abandoned, forsook her entirely; finding voices in the dark she could not tell them apart and not knowing to whom she spoke gave up her stories, swallowing them down they gather in her throat and clench her jaw. The lies, placed beneath her tongue benevolently, are pus-filled sores that will one day erode her bone; having worn her age chiseled from her shoulder this worries her little. Memories are collected as flakes behind her eyelids. She learns to sleep with the lights on. She blinks naught for lack of trying and her eyes no longer recognize the faces repeated nor the brick road below her feet. She is lost, hopelessly lost, in the side streets between two temples. Lounging on pillows and mats along the river bank, she excuses herself to buy lemongrass sausages from the manicured hands of the son of a frowning woman whose six year old daughter is wielding a machete.

She is clapping her hands, laughing with glee, as two naked Frenchmen juggle for her amusement. She had been the fourth in the bed but the fifth on the bike. She is now the second crazy girl listening to the German entomologist's stories of beetle-hunting in Africa and lecturing an alchemist on primatology in a tongue she doesn't, quite, speak. She met with Marx and Malthus on a green grass knoll and they took her home to the water buffalo. She is reiterating her interest to Socrates, buying him a coffee as he confesses to the chromosomal mutations behind animism; he has told her his secrets on the condition she share them.

She promises to remember – and to pass them on – the same promises she has made before but never kept, because she cannot untangle the echo in her head which blends her shadows to theirs.

She was left a textbook and a hundred children for two weeks; she taught them pronouns and they taught her not how to say hello – as younger children, two sisters, had taught her that already – but why to greet. Then when will come later, later as she learns the tragedy of being a naiad in the desert and the prodigal returned un-haloed. It is the guilt-filled absolution of a desecrate dank, unresolved, that she pushes out her lungs – word by word. She gives her thanks and lends out greetings in their languages, eats with her hands and lets them change her name. It was for this that she was adopted, perhaps. Adopted and adopting but not changed, for she is all of this at once and was already.