An Apostate: Nawin of Thais

cy apart from the inundations of wanderlust of a nearly middle aged man on his inexplicable, cowardly journey to Laos. Sentience had its limitations; so why sleep seemed like a jammed clock for a few seconds, a wave for a few more, and then an edge of a cliff, a precipice, that intersected with the ethereal was as insoluble as why man in all this impermanence could master his fears enough to go out and forge his destiny.

Numb in his tenebrous tomb, it seemed to him that time was a man-made concept erroneously believed as fully real and tangible because of all the clocks and calendars, made to measure mortality, and things known to have already passed away. As the religious measured the ethics of their actions by those of the characters in their scripture, so was time (its tattered relationships, its solitary and jejune rides in coffins on board trains) a fiction to mark individual and collective progress.

But then, he told himself, he was not traveling to Laos to progress but to degenerate. It w