Floating

Last year I went to Mum's shop for Loy Krathong night. This year, I stayed at home, declining an invitation to visit friends out there and float a small candle-lit banana boat.

Mum's younger sister, and her farang boyfriend invited me to float a krathong with them on the nearby Chao Phraya River, but I declined.

I felt guilty, turning down an invitation from friends, but I felt too tired.

While I have energy, the thought of mixing in crowds of beautiful young people appeals. When I am in need of sleep, the prospect of jostling for space to float a krathong makes me long for bed even more.

Instead, I visited a canal close to home.

Even at 15 minutes to midnight, when I arrived, the place was busy. Families were lining up on a small pier to release their floats into the water. As they waited in line, men and women clutching their floats would hold them up to their head, and pray for a better year ahead.

I can visit two piers close to my place, one on each side of a basketball court. An eatery next to the pier on one side had brought out tables and chairs so customers could sit outside and watch kids fish the floats from the river.

Young children were swimming in the canal next to the pier. In the canal itself, banana-leaf floats drifted by on the current, brought down our way from further upstream in the Chao Phraya river.

I crossed the basketball court to the other pier. Here, the queue was just as long. Plastic tubs of fish swimming in water sat on the road next to the pier. Revellers buy the fish to set them free into the canal, once again for good luck.

Revellers set off firecrackers, which made a loud bang. The firecrackers had started going off at midnight 24 hours before, the start of Loy Krathong day. I heard the last bang as I walked home at midnight.

In my early years in Thailand, boyfriend Maiyuu and I would buy a float and release it in Lumpini Park. We haven't floated a krathong together for many years now, as he has a friend whose birthday falls on the same day. Every year, on Loy Krathong night, he goes to see his friend instead.

At home, I found I could not sleep, because I was missing Maiyuu. I had also run out of sleeping pills. At 2.30am, I visited the local hospital, where I saw a young female doctor, who noticed I had made many visits to the hospital when in need of sleep to ask for medication.

'Do you want to see a psychiatrist?' she asked.

'Sometimes I know the cause, but by then it's too late. If I can pin down the cause, it's enough...I don't need to see anyone,' I said.

'So what's the cause this time?'

'I need human company,' I said. Maybe I should have lugged my weary body out to Mum's shop after all.

She gave me my pills, and I left.