Meeting Rainbow

I proceeded to ask Rainbow if she wanted to come with me to one of these crystals-guitar-sound-bath-meditation-healing-chakra-opener-group-therapy sessions Koh Phangan seems to have three of every day, where someone strums a guitar while everyone lies on the floor searching for themselves and trying to forgive their parents (I had entered the phase of travel where every questionable idea sounded like a good story).

“Show me the flyer.”

Filling the screen was a sun-kissed Adonis with waist-length silver hair, cradling an acoustic guitar like it contained the secrets of the universe. His eyes radiated the unshakable certainty of a late-90s self-help scammer: the kind of Midwestern man in a bad tie and an ill-fitting shirt who promised lonely men a path back to their masculinity one phone call at a time.

“A white guy leading a sound bath?”

“Eum, looks like it?”

“Bro, I’m not going to that crap. The only thing white people know how to do well is make money.”

I loved that. And then I left.

After Rainbow ghosted a message from me for a full day, I woke up to my surprise with the following words on my screen: "Let's hang out? And take some pics."

Say less.

I got to her place – a treehouse-looking wooden cabin in the middle of a tropical forest. Inside were a cheap Buddhist blanket, Hindu stickers whose meanings I didn’t understand, tiny bronze animal statuettes, and a collection of incredibly cool jewelry she had made herself. Among them was a pair of glasses with a stone and small skulls perched above the frame, held in place by a coil of barbed wire twisted into the shape of a snake.

She offered me a fresh green cigar – it was unlike any cigar I had ever seen before.

“It’s not weed right?”

“No”

Well, it wasn’t… Until the weed came out.

The THC kicked in. The bodies relaxed. The philosophical rambling began. And Rainbow started to educate my uncultured ass on Hindu and Buddhist stories, myths, and beliefs – worlds I knew almost nothing about. She proceeded to grace the speaker with spiritual meditative chants from ancient India. The kind of hypnotic music that turns the outside world into background noise. I imagine a fire, masks, costumes, a ceremony, a cult. I feel transported.

Suddenly, "OMMMMMMMM" bursts out of the speaker with the intensity of an Arab mom screaming out her son’s name when she realizes he’s been hiding his bad report cards from her. Before I can even process it, the Om merges with the singing of the jungle crickets outside until it became impossible to tell where the music ended and the jungle began. That Om entered me like a freight train, vibrating through every cell of my body and dragging me into a state of presence I didn’t know was even close to possible. My feet start shaking like crazy, releasing all the stress I had accumulated trying to keep all the random shit I bought over 3 months of travel below the 23kg airline luggage weight limit. “DAMN”, I think to myself, “I should maybe start taking that spirituality-yoga-wellness crap more seriously”.

The Indian chants grow louder. Rainbow gets up. She starts dancing fluidly through the room, as if something deeper than thought was guiding her movements. She twists her hands and body into strange shapes – like a ritual. And then it clicks. Here it is. That’s the fucking moment. I grab my camera and start shooting her like a madman. Then – CLICK. I snap one of those shots. One of those goddamn shots that make the hairs on your arms stand up. Complete lucidity. Or so I thought.

“FUCK” I think to myself.

“FUCK, man.”

I’m suddenly looking down at the room from the ceiling. There’s some strange-looking guy holding a piece of metal and glass next to his face. His tan is terrible, he looks like he’s barely in balance, and he’s frozen there with a stupid expression on his face. It takes me a moment to recognize him. That guy is me. I keep the camera pressed to my eye for a second longer, just staring at the frame, letting the reality of it land. And it all comes into focus.

I’m in a fucking treehouse in Thailand. There’s a beautiful hippie in front of me completely surrendering herself to some invisible force. And I’m here with a camera, freezing the magic in time. Who am I? What is this?

This is the stuff you never think about. The strange places. The unexpected moments. The feeling that you stumbled into something you were never supposed to see. The absurd. The immortal. This is fucking art. And I’m right in the middle of it. Me. Erik. A photographer.

16-year-old-high feelings suddenly take over. Thank god. The munchies hit. Rainbow disappears into the kitchen and comes back with a Mongolian dish she had made the night before: dried beef swimming in some kind of weird gooey Indian butter. Loads of it. And there it is – right on schedule: the food orgasm. The warm, homey, puree-like dish makes its way to the bottom of my soul, where the earlier Om from the Indian shaman was still healing every broken cell of my stomach – a stomach shaped by years as a corporate consultant in NYC running on whiskey sours and endless beige bowls of corporate takeout – the kind of food that looks healthy but tastes like cardboard. I have absolutely no idea what Rainbow’s dish was. I don’t care. It remains the best fucking meal I’ve ever had.

I was too high to drive home, so Rainbow told me to sleep on her couch. We passed out at 8 p.m. and woke up at 11 a.m. the next morning to the sound of a rooster. For most of my time on Koh Phangan, the weather had been shit. Rain. Clouds. Grey skies. This was my final day. The sun had finally – FINALLY – decided to show up. I HAD to get to the beach. Immediately. We jumped on my motorbike and took off. Five minutes into the ride, with the excitement of a child on cocaine seeing Disneyland for the first time, Rainbow shouts:

“Wow! Look at that tree! Let’s pull over!!”

Five minutes later she spotted an elephant. We stopped. A little further on, a cockfighting ring. We stopped again. Every stop pissed the shit out of me initially, yet slowly became another adventure. Without realizing it, Rainbow reminded me of something I’d been terrible at appreciating my whole life: There is beauty in slowing down. Beauty in wasting time. Beauty in having nowhere to be. We ended up reaching the beach just in time to miss the sun.

As daylight started fading, I started driving her back to her treehouse. We connected my phone to her portable speaker and rode over the rolling roads of Koh Phangan, the island rising and falling beneath us like the back of a dragon. The hills held the last of the sun. The island breathed around us. The road stretched ahead, endless. Everything outside that moment seemed to disappear when –

“AWOOOOOOOOOO” Rainbow suddenly screams from the bottom of her lungs.

HAH. I laugh, process the scream, and think to myself – fuck it.

"AWOOOOOOOOOOO" I scream back, hitting the throttle like a teenager who had just discovered the taste of freedom. The speedometer climbs higher. The air becomes colder against my face. The music disappears beneath the sound of the wind intensifying. Passing headlights cut through the darkness in flashes of red as we race through the mountains.

And in that moment, I wasn’t thinking about the past or the future. I wasn’t thinking about where I was going next. I was just there. On a motorbike. On a jungle road in Thailand. With a stranger named Rainbow who had somehow become a friend. And somewhere between the wind, the laughter, the music, and the fading light, I had this sudden, almost ridiculous realization: I was happy. Not because something had changed. Not because I had figured anything out. Just because, for a brief moment, I wasn’t looking for anything. The world was loud and fast and beautiful, and as we leaned into the next curve, a thought hit me so hard it almost made my chest ache:

“Fuck. It’s good to be alive.”