When I was traveling through Thailand, I started in Phuket, which is a major party island but I did not realize this when I bought my ticket. There I met this woman who was staying in the same tiny little hostel room with me. I assumed she was about 25 years old. She was not.

One night and a kickboxing lesson later, I joined her and our other roommate, whose name I cannot remember but who was also not 25, downstairs at a folding table in the street where they were having dinner. The quiet alleyway by our tiny hostel was now a crowded marketplace. That night we talked about love, as many of my conversations while traveling did.

The first woman, a pastry chef turned head chef of a private yacht, who taught herself impeccable French after being turned away from a discriminatory yet prestigious pastry school in France, who had a slight smoking addiction but I'm not sure she'd be French if she did not, who worked so hard and after failure and failure found herself in Thailand taking a retreat, retiring from boat life as glamorous and grueling as it was. She is 35, going on 36 now. She had just stopped seeing someone when we met and I must say that the French way of doing life is almost a caricature compared to the minimalistic way I had thought you were supposed to live life.

I told them over dinner, my French friend, and my German friend.

I'm leaving because this is not what I came looking for. I told them I was going to find what I was looking for on a different island. The next day I landed on Koh Samui, Cold Island (koh means island in Thai and samui means cold in Japanese). Chloe told me that she would follow, too, and a day later she sent me a text saying that she had arrived on the island and that we should go party. She always made me laugh with her blunt youthfulness.

I don't have any picture with her, and perhaps that is my fault. But I don't think I could ever forget her. She had a caustic humor about her. She had seen it all, she had seen the best and worst of people, the worst of the world, and the richest of the world. Had bought herself red-bottomed shoes, had been flown out wherever she wanted, cooked some of the most expensive meals, had tumultuous romances. Lived a lifestyle I didn't even know could exist.

When we first met she told me she was going to Japan to get a certification as a sushi chef, she'd spent more money on it than I probably had in my whole year in Japan. We met up in Tokyo. She had stopped seeing the man that chronicled her love stories from Thailand. I knew that she was of a different generation, of a different world and I was so enchanted, you know?

I took her to gay Shinjuku, the 2nd district. We met up for Japanese curry, for coffee, and she offered me some of the extra sushi she made in school. We only communicated by a Japanese messaging app which I deleted and I'm sure she has too. I still think about her sometimes. When we parted ways she had started seeing someone new, she met him at the sushi school. She was thinking of moving to the Netherlands. And working on a boat again.

I hope that we meet again.