Sorry for getting old

In February my friend Michelle visited me in the coastal village of Zipolite in Mexico’s southern Oaxaca state, where I have been semi-residing since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

I had last seen Michelle in Kazakhstan in 2014, when we were still in our 30s and I had descended briefly upon her apartment in the Kazakh capital of Astana before darting off to Lebanon and Vietnam. This pre-pandemic modus operandi of manic international itinerance had been driven by a combination of factors, including an apparent desire to thwart the passage of time by remaining in constant motion and a need to avoid my psychologically destructive homeland, the United States, at all cost.

Time passed anyway, of course. Michelle returned home to Washington; I ended up temporarily sedentary in Mexico, and we both entered our 40s. Our 2023 reunion began with requisite reminiscences of nearly freezing to death in the Kazakh countryside, patronising all-night karaoke bars, and placing our palms in the gilded handprint of then-dictator of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev in Astana’s looming Bayterek monument.