I’ve never been much of a chick-flick guy, but The Vampire Diaries became a quiet backdrop to my life in my late teens and twenties. I didn’t tune in intentionally at first; it was just playing on the TVs where I worked. I happened to catch a few episodes and liked Damon’s character, so I kept watching. But the show didn’t mean much to me until I met Klaus. Most people hated him, but I resonate with back then, I was beaten, broken, and crushed. I had rebuilt myself out of darkness, using cutthroat, terrible tactics just to advance my career and status. I was driven by a thirst for power and a desperate need to display that power to the people who had crushed me. It got to my head, but one good thing came out of that dark era: a woman who became my Cami. I even spoke the exact words to her that Klaus said to Cami in their final moments: “Unlike all of the souls I have encountered and forgotten in the very long march of time, I will carry you with me.”

Eleven years later, I still remember everything. The night we sat at that bar on 19th Street; the look on her face when we rolled down the windows and opened the sunroof driving across the Thanlyin Bridge; the night we met at the riverside hotel where I liked to throw parties; and the very next day, when we couldn’t bring ourselves to part ways because we were so deeply connected; those last days in cheap hostel in Bangkok; when I made a mess in Khaosan Road fighting. I remember every exact details every time I made her smile or cry. Out of all the promises I broke, I kept that last one: I carried her with me. Trust me, I love my wife, and I’d be in a lot of trouble if she ever read this. Fortunately, one thing is for sure is she won’t read anything in English longer than three or four sentences. I married her for different reasons. She happens to resemble Cami, but that’s not why I chose her. Cami was someone who truly understood a person’s darkness and she knew it inside and out. She had the capacity to look through a man’s terrible side and see the person underneath.

After all the pain of losing everything and starting over, I changed completely. My taste in music, my connection to nature, my entire identity shifted. I became a different person and spent several years alone traveling, staring into space, and sitting by myself for hours. I was like a feather on the Chao Phraya River, wandering without any direction, finding random places to visit simply because I saw them on a Windows Spotlight wallpaper photo. My only closest thing to friends were a few monkeys I was feeding in Lopburi.

Then, one evening, I pulled over out of pure curiosity. Cars and pickup trucks were parked side-by-side, everyone looking up at the sky. I parked with a sarcastic joke in my head, thinking that maybe the Vulcans had finally arrived. That would have been far more interesting, but it turned out to just be fireworks. As I watched them with a sense of emptiness, I looked around. To my left was a pickup truck, and in the bed was a little boy, around three or four years old. When the first loud bangs echoed, he flinched and buried his face in his father’s chest. The father gently reassured him, pointing up at the fireworks, and I saw the pure wonder light up in that little boy’s eyes.

I never had that as a child. Whenever I heard a loud bang growing up, I learned to close my eyes, cover my ears, and huddle in a corner. I never had a chest to hide against, or someone to show me the beauty in the noise. Standing there at 27, I knew it was too late to find a father or be comforted by one, but I realized I could be a father. I could actually create that same majestic moment for someone else. That was the exact moment I decided to drive back to my mother and start over.

If these years have taught me anything, it’s that intelligence feels like a curse at least for me. To constantly carry these thoughts in my head, asking what all of this means, feels absurd in such a broken world. Knowing the grand design doesn’t make sense, I realize I am simply going to wake up, walk, eat, drink, have sex, and, if I’m lucky, die peacefully one day. I almost envy those who can blindly devote themselves to a religion, a cult, or any strict belief system. It gives them the ability to believe and focus on what makes them happy to get through life. You can even be a narcissistic, egocentric arsehole, yet you won’t sit around having an existential crisis every ten seconds, feeling stuck.

That’s s why I chose my wife. She is an unbroken, happy woman who grew up like a princess, surrounded by siblings who loved and fought with each other in equal measure. Even now, at the age of 30, her mother and father are still there for her, cleaning up her messes. She isn’t necessarily spoiled, but she is an unbroken, fragile, beautiful being. That is all I want for my son: to be a simple, protected child who will still view the world as a good place and live his life to the fullest.

So, I keep the only promise I ever gave her for the last time. I always carry her with me in my memories, in the places I visit, and in old photographs. Hopefully, one day she can imagine that I am happy, just as I hope she is. The daily struggles give me enough reason to wake up and fight for another day, even as I wander down memory lane to keep that final vow.