When I woke from a dreamless sleep, I found us naked in each other’s arms with our bathrobes sloughed off. There he lay in my arms, quiet as always. I touched the tip of his long nose and his cheeks. The air conditioner made them feel cold and dry to the touch.

We spent that morning shopping. Gyu-ho wanted to go to Khao San Road, which he’d heard so much about, and we decided to take a river taxi there. There was a squall as soon as we got onto the boat, and we were drenched through by the time we arrived. The rain kept coming down, and there was no place for us to go except a guesthouse nearby that charged around 50,000 won. After using the communal shower (basically a concrete floor with a few water hoses), we lay down on the creaking bed with our clothes off. And we had sex. Watching the ceiling fan rapidly slice up the air above us, I felt as if we had been connected into one body. I hadn’t felt that way in a long time.

By the time the rain stopped, the sun was setting. We gazed at the atmospheric view and the violet sun as we downed a couple of beers. We bought matching Winnie the Pooh tank tops and put them on right away.

On Saturday, we wore the tank tops again, this time to the clubs. It was midnight when a familiar song started to play: T-ara’s “Sexy Love.” How many years had it been? A group of locals—my T-ara group’s counterpart in Thailand—stormed the stage and began to flawlessly execute the choreography. Gyu-ho and I screamed as we hugged each other and hopped up and down. Gyu-ho’s head felt warm and lovely, and we kissed right there in the middle of the club.

I’ve read somewhere that lovers will only quarrel when they visit Bangkok together, and we were the same. That one of us was staring after some guy, that the traffic was atrocious, and a whole score of other things I don’t even remember squabbling about and getting into a wordless funk over—none of that mattered after a few pints and a kiss.

Because we were on vacation.

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After we came back to reality, we quickly became mired in the usual fatigue that came with the work we had to do for a living. The tank tops we wore in Thailand became loungewear. Pooh’s face on the chest of our clothes started to pill, got splattered by broth from instant noodles, and then faded. Occasionally we laughed over our memories of the trip, but mostly we exchanged complaints about how dead tired we were, pinging them back and forth like we were playing table tennis. Gyu-ho and I had come to see each other as a part of a landscape of tedium. Just another prop in our monotonous, sweaty days.