So much for not writing for a long time, eh? Well, I have to do something to keep my mind occupied while I’m waiting for the time to go pick up Mom and Dad, so I thought I’d type up some of my thoughts from yesterday’s cooking adventures for you.

It sounded innocent enough—learning to make fish amok from our dear and diminutive Khmer teacher. It had escaped my mind how graphic the experience of buying fish at the market can be. I was following along rather blindly, daydreaming about something or other, when a loud thud brought me back to reality. The fishseller had a live fish in one hand, as long as her arm from hand to elbow and twice as thick, and a wooden club in the other, with which she was beating the fish over the head. I think I just stood there staring with my mouth open until she grabbed a second fish, and I snapped out of my mesmerized state just in time to assure her that we only wanted one.

Then she set to work cleaning the thing—chopping it in half, pulling out the internal organs, slicing off the scaly skin like the peel off a cucumber. The most disconcerting moment was when the half with the head, which I had long presumed to be quite dead, started flailing about while its tail end was being skinned and filleted on the chopping block next to it.

I’m not usually one for watching living things suffer, but this fascinated me. It was one more reminder of how full of life everything is here, and how close it all is to death. Life in Cambodia feels so real, so raw, so vivid. It’s so full of color, in every sense of the word. Sensory overload from every direction. Chilies that burn your throat and limes that pucker your mouth and coffee that hurts your tongue with its sweetness. Sun that bakes your flesh and beggars who grab your arm and mosquitoes that gorge themselves on your blood. Smells of frangipanni flowers, urine, frying garlic, and rotting garbage all invading your nostrils. Horns blasting, kids screaming, wedding music blaring through amps hooked up to car batteries. Orange-robed monks, neon cartoon-character shorts, gold-and-rhinestone flip-flops. And now it all feels perfectly normal. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so alive, so beautifully and painfully aware of my physical state of living, so beautifully and painfully aware of how precious that is.

So many of the protective layers that separated me from my surroundings in North America are stripped away here. Take away air-con and enclosed vehicles and soundproof walls. Eliminate space between houses, closed doors, shrink-wrapped Styrofoam trays of bloodless meat. When things happen here, I feel them.

When it’s hot, I sweat. When it’s cold, I shiver. When it rains, I get wet. When the roof leaks, I move my desk. When the sun rises, I get up. When it gets dark, I go home. When the electricity goes out, I sleep. When it’s mango season, I feast on mangos. When jackfruit is cheap, I stuff myself with jackfruit. When rice gets expensive, I eat less. When gas prices soar, I ride my bicycle. When the mosquitoes come, I hide inside my net. When the gate is locked, I stay home. When there’s no water, I forego the shower. When the neighbors have a wedding, I don’t sleep.

It makes everything feel so close. Makes me feel so close to everything. My food, my environment, my fellow human beings. So many things are simply out of my control. It used to frustrate me to no end. Now, I’m addicted to the freedom that not trying to be in control affords you. These weeks, these months have been full of intense pain, intense joy, intense hope, intense life. I’m afraid, two months from now, of sitting in an air-conditioned classroom, walking down a sterile, sanitary grocery store aisle, driving down a smooth, straight, sidewalked street, perfectly comfortable, going perfectly crazy, aching for something to make me sweat, itch, feel, live like I have here. It’s not pretty, maybe, but it’s real. I want my meat to bleed.