My childhood is full of images like this, passing moments I didn’t understand, as if I were looking through a window into the aftermath of a great event. The school year passed and another began. Sopham and I grew accustomed to our parents’ silence, to the way they withdrew from each other. And then, one night, I saw them sitting side by side, their shoulders touching. Later on, I saw my father caress my mother’s face and between them, once more, was a world I couldn’t enter, full of pathos and history and seeking. What I saw this time was not an aftermath, but a window open to a different way of loving each other. My mother’s longing for my father returns to me. At the end, their lives had grown so intertwined the one could not go on, could not survive, without the other. I had known this from the beginning, from the moment when my father was taken away. From that loss, there had been no return. I try to face the depth of her love. The way she never abandoned us, and how it tore her open.

I want to remember the way they lived, carried forward by intimacies and dreams I cannot know. The way they lived much more than the remaining days could give them.

The bus goes on, past cerulean lakes and ragged caves, past mist encroaching on the jungle.

Hiroji wakes. He takes his jacket and lays it across his knees. “I was trying to remember my brother’s face,” he says. “Before he left for the east, when we were young. But, somehow, that memory of him has gone away.” How many lives can we live? I wonder. How many can we steal back and piece together? I cannot measure how much Hiroji and James have given me, in trust, in friendship.

I remember the stories my mother used to tell me, stories that had been handed down by her own grandmother’s grandmother, who had married a merchant and travelled from the villages outside of Battambang. My mother once told me that when a child is born, threads are tied around the infant’s wrists to bind her soul to her body. The soul is a slippery thing. A door slammed too loudly can send it running. A beautiful, shining object can catch its attention and lure it away. But in darkness, unpursued, the soul, the pralung, can climb back in through an open window, it can be returned to you. We did not come in solitude, my mother told me. Inside us, from the beginning, we were entrusted with many lives. From the first morning to the last, we try to carry them until the end.

“When everything is finished here, will you come home?” I ask Hiroji.

The passing landscape, the folding light, reflects in his eyes. He turns to look at me. “Yes,” he says. “I will.”

I imagine awaiting his arrival, remembering my own. The sky is such a pure and fragile white, filling all the space between the trees and the road.