Getting Dumped in Cambodia: A Story of My Heartbreak

I'm awake but my eyes are closed- trying to recall my dream- but the real world encroaches. It's hot already and loud. City loud. Outside my bed, beyond the netting that always manages to trap a mosquito or two with me during the night, I hear the stirrings of Delilah. I suspect she's been up for a while. If I let her know I'm awake, I'll lose all recollection of my dream in the void that is reality. So I simply keep my eyes closed and...

"Finally," Delilah says. "Itchy awakens."

I sit up at the edge of the bed, mosquito net tickling my naked shoulders. I'm tired from lackluster sleep thanks to the damn mosquito, but it's too hot and Delilah has something to tell me. Something big. I know this because it's obvious she's been chain-smoking all morning and now she's sighing heavily. I don't know what's bugging her, but I do know that I'm not ready to acknowledge her yet. I scratch my ankle. It's soar but behind the sharp painful annoyance dances the pleasure. There's a build up but no release. I'm horrible at shutting out the itch. If it's burning, I scratch. I try to ignore it, I'll chant mantras: not going to scratch, not going to scratch, winter in July, winter in July. Sometimes I'll even revisit the old remedy my cousins Stephanie and Stacy taught my brother and me back in preteen, magic land. You make an 'x' on the fresh pock with your fingernail and then you smack it. It stuns the itch for like two to three minutes. Band-Aid Magic we called it. In Cambodia, this trick is completely ineffective. Cambodian mosquitoes are cunningly tiny and silent, and when night falls, they are as ubiquitous as air molecules. Air molecules that suck your blood. So fuck it, I scratch, unlike everyone else I might ad. The others seem to handle it okay and seeing me suffer in their stead, absorbing their mosquito bite annoyances like some minor-level savior, they have donned me a nickname: Itchy.

"Yup," I crack my neck and stretch my head back. "Itchy needs coffee."