The Country That Taught Me How to Carry Weight

The Country That Taught Me How to Carry Weight

I came to Cambodia because I'd run out of ways to fix myself and the therapist kept asking questions I couldn't answer without lying. The flight was cheap. The reason was cheaper—desperation dressed up as wanderlust, grief pretending to be curiosity about temples I'd seen in photographs that made loneliness look like architecture. The air in Phnom Penh met me like a hand I didn't know how to hold: warm, insistent, smelling of limes and diesel and something I later learned was history that wouldn't stay buried.

I stood by the river where the water moved like it had somewhere to be and I didn't, watching monks in saffron robes catch wind that seemed kinder to them than to me. Motorbikes threaded through morning as if the city were a loom and I was the one thread that kept snagging, that kept forgetting the pattern. I'd come for a story that would move differently inside me—something with edges of stone and the taste of salt, with dust that would settle on my skin and mean I'd been somewhere besides the bottom of my own head.

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum found me on a Tuesday when I thought I was just killing time before I had to decide whether to keep living or just keep moving. They call it S-21 now but it used to be a high school before it became a place where people were tortured for confessions they didn't have. I walked through classrooms turned into cells, past photographs of faces that looked directly at me and asked: what are you doing with the life you get to keep?. The walls still hold the screams if you listen wrong. I sat on a bench in the courtyard and put my head between my knees because grief is contagious and I'd brought my own and now I had theirs too and I didn't know how to carry both.

Outside, a tuk-tuk driver offered me water and didn't ask why I was crying. He drew a circle on a paper napkin to show me how the boulevards wander and return, as if the city were teaching itself how to remember and forget at the same time, and I thought: maybe I can learn that too. Maybe I can hold the worst thing and still find my way back to breakfast.

Angkor Wat arrived like a dare I didn't know I'd accepted. The towers rose the way mountains rise in dreams—familiar and impossible, like something I'd been before I learned how to be broken. I crossed the causeway at dawn with steps that tried to be respectful of everything stone must endure: feet and weather and the way admiration can be heavy if you don't carry it right. Inside, bas-reliefs unfurled like long murmurs of devotion and battle, and I ran my fingers over the air an inch above the carvings because touching felt like too much and not touching felt like cowardice.

What they don't tell you about Angkor is that it's built on ley lines—ancient energy grids that shamans and healers say make the ground hum with frequencies that can crack you open if you're not careful. I sat on a step in a corridor where light slipped through like it knew a secret, and I felt my heart slow until time and I were on speaking terms again. People talk about size, about symmetry, about engineering that refuses to be ordinary. What I remember is the way the temple made me small enough to fit back inside my own life.

At Bayon, stone faces bloomed from towers with expressions so serene I wanted to scream. They looked at me from every direction like they knew I'd been lying about being fine, like they'd seen everyone who'd ever stood here pretending their heart wasn't a handful of broken pottery they were trying to glue back together in the wrong order. I stood beneath one of those gazes and told the air I would try to be better company for myself. A guide nearby taught a little boy how to frame his mother in a doorway, and the shutter clicked and caught not just a face but the logic of being held in place by love, and I cried again because I'd forgotten that was possible.

Ta Prohm is where trees and temples agreed to share custody of time. Silk-cotton roots pour over corridors like slow rivers of muscle, doorways become throats the forest is learning to sing through, and I placed my palm on a wall cool as shade and felt a pulse—mine, the tree's, the temple's, the morning's—braiding in a rhythm large enough to make me stop apologizing for taking up space. This place teaches impermanence without cruelty, shows you that things can fall apart and still be beautiful, still be holy, still be worth the walk through mud and heat to witness.

The roads between temples were red dust and potholes that opened like questions I couldn't answer quickly. The bus heaved and sighed, and I watched palm fronds flicker past and thought about all the ways a person learns to be here when "here" feels impossible: half by directions, half by strangers who share umbrellas in rain without asking your name. When the sky broke and stitched the fields together with water, a woman I didn't know pressed jackfruit into my hands because sweetness travels well and she could see I needed something to carry besides grief.

Buddhist monks at the temples offered blessings I didn't ask for and probably didn't deserve. They touched my head with hands that smelled like incense and spoke words I couldn't understand, but my nervous system understood—it stopped screaming for the first time in months. Researchers say Cambodians healed from the Khmer Rouge genocide by "calming the mind" through Buddhist practices, by learning to hold trauma without letting it define every breath. I didn't know if I had the right to borrow their methods for my smaller, stupider grief, but I tried anyway because I was out of options.

In Siem Reap I found wellness retreats where Westerners paid thousands to learn mindfulness from monks who'd survived genocide. I couldn't afford the retreats so I sat outside pagodas and listened to chanting leak through walls and let it rearrange something in my chest I didn't have words for. I learned to bow, to light incense with both hands, to sit still long enough that my thoughts stopped chasing their own tails. It wasn't healing. It was just the first time in a year I didn't want to disappear.

Sihanoukville met me with laundry flapping from balconies like flags of truce and water that translated heat into something I could survive. I swam until my body remembered it used to know how to float, how to turn toward horizon instead of inward toward the bottomless hole where hope used to live. At dusk I ate rice and grilled fish at a table with legs in sand, and the chili on my tongue wrote a sentence that ended in maybe, in not yet, in keep going.

Markets taught me a different language—price and generosity braided together, a boy selling paper fans who taught me how to snap them open with flourish that made grandmothers laugh until they wiped tears with their scarves. At a spice stall I bought pepper dark as wet soil and thought about hands that turned sun and rain into small storms for the tongue, about labor I'd never see but could taste. In a shop with crooked shelves I bought a notebook the color of pond water and promised to fill it with sentences that earned their place, with truths that didn't need to perform.

By the time I circled back to Phnom Penh my walk had changed. I placed my feet nearer the ground as if the earth had something to whisper at ankle level, as if I'd finally learned to listen. The things I thought would define the trip—the famous stones, the healing energy, the spiritual transformation tourists pay for—had kept their promises, but it was the quiet agreements that rearranged me: an umbrella shared in rain, a monk's glance, a vendor who pressed extra basil into my bag because my thank you made her laugh.

At the station I stood with my hands on my bag strap and told myself what the country had already told me: healing is not a destination, it's choreography. You step forward, you step aside, you pause, you drag yourself through one more day. The train arrived and I climbed aboard carrying one truth close enough to keep me warm—roads can break you, temples can crack you open, grief can follow you across oceans, but if you're lucky, very lucky, the weight gets distributed differently. You learn to carry it like the stone faces at Bayon carry centuries: with grace you didn't know you had, with stillness that looks like peace from the outside even when it's just exhaustion that finally learned to sit down.