One day toward the end of college I ran into a former housemate on campus.
“ Trevor and Scott went to Thailand last night.”

Huh?

“ They’d had a few beers and decided to go to the airport and take the first flight they could get on, wherever it was going.”

And it was going to Bangkok.

“ They missed Sao Paolo by a couple of minutes.”

That it was Trevor and Scott in particular was as surprising as the action itself. While neither time nor money was a concern—Trevor had ample family resources, and he and Scott were both taking the semester off for some reason—they were usually circumspect in their behavior, and had only recently, due to their mutual academic inactivity, become friends. Hyper-intelligent overachievers both of them, they were the type to formulate a plan and follow it diligently, not to take sudden, expensive plane flights to faraway destinations.
Happy as I am with my mid-thirties domesticity (pregnant wife, mortgage, etc.), I like to think back on a time when I lived free of strictures and routine, and could take exotic journeys on a lark. As far as going to Southeast Asia, though, I never took advantage when I could. I had multiple opportunities to get there before responsibilities to myself and others intruded, yet I didn’t make it. I once ventured off on a spontaneous camping trip in the midst of crunch time at work (though it was a weekend), and I’ve driven cross-country on a whim more than once, but Scott and Trevor’s excursion was extreme. It still seems extreme. They came back after five days or so and told the Southeast Asia stories one usually hears from college-aged single American males, though theirs centered more on mild substance abuse than sexual depravity, because that is the type of people my friends are: feminist partiers.
I’d’ve been right there with them on that plane, I swear to God, if I had been there at the moment or truth. I lived a mile from their house, my closest friends still lived there, and I spent plenty of time hanging out, doing laundry, eating frozen waffles and debating the merits and demerits of political correctness (it was Berkeley, 1991), so it easily could have happened that way. But I missed it, and that is one of my chief regrets in life, because the opportunity to get to Southeast Asia is no longer in my foreseeable future, and because Trevor died this summer.

After graduation, some other friends from school went to Cambodia for various reasons, finding work as a Reuters stringer or making a documentary film. They traveled the region, then came back to Phnom Penh and hung around the Foreign Correspondents’ Club for a few months, doing whatever it is they do around there. I figured I’d make my way over eventually while they were in country but I never got around to it and before too long they all came home.

In the years following, Southeast Asia was always on my agenda but somehow the trip never materialized. It seemed awfully far and alien and expensive—precisely its appeal, of course, but nonetheless a journey to make in the company of another. But I wasn’t too sophisticated in the girlfriend department at the time and I guess going with a friend seemed weird, though I do remember trying to make plans with someone, who’d also lived in that house on Claremont Avenue and, now that I think of it, was the guy who introduced Trevor and Scott. But we were unable to coordinate the timing.

Instead I went to London for an article in 1995; I went to a wedding in Franche-Comté in ‘98; my now-wife and I visited France in 2000. (“Nous sommes en vacanes à Paris et en Provence,” we sang to the tune of the “Toreador” song from “Carmen.” “J’ai mangé trop fromage et je suis fatigué.”) We thought about doing Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Phnom Penh, Angkor, and Hue for our honeymoon, but decided that particular vacation wasn’t the one we wanted to make so high-intensity, and chose Italy instead. My wife had never been, and we planned it perfectly, first, in Positano, lounging poolside by day and staying out dancing till all hours, next driving a convertible through Tuscany, then wandering Venice, breezy and empty at night after the other tourists had gone back to their cruise ships. And last year we went to Botswana because Ericka is a freak about wildlife and the way things are going on Planet Earth you never know how long before a place like that is completely ruined by any one of a number of factors. Plus the place is just unreal of course.
So it’s not that I’m complaining. All these were great trips and I’m fortunate to have made any of them. But Southeast Asia was next on our list and we put it off when the Bali bombing happened, then there was SARS, then we decided it was the right time to have a baby. And now it looks like I will never get to Southeast Asia.

I said “looks like.” Obviously we can drag a small child through the region if we choose, or we can wait years until the kid(s?) are at camp or something, but is it just me or does neither of those seem as romantic as getting drunk and taking off for the airport, finding yourself in Bangkok twenty-two hours later? This is the difference between one’s twenties and one’s forties, I suppose.

Since Trevor’s accidental death six weeks ago all the moments I didn’t spend with him have come rushing back to me in a flood of regret. Scotty was at the funeral, of course; he works in biotech in Palo Alto now. If I had declined the Thailand adventure I’d feel worse, no doubt, and there are ski trips I might have taken with Trevor and didn’t, but the Thailand trip’s non-existence is significant to me in a way no other road-not-taken is. It represents a spot on the curve of my life that I no longer occupy, but may again one day: the place where one is liberated from responsibilities and can act rashly and suddenly with little thought to consequences, because there are none beyond the relative innocuity of a credit card bill.

And because Trevor’s curve flattened so abruptly and unjustly, I grasp achingly for the moments that never happened between us: him and Scott and me in Bangkok, sweating in the humidity aboard a boat on a canal, or standing jet-lagged late at night outside a bar and deciding whether to enter this one or the next we happen onto.

Someone told me that the only consolation is that I knew him at all; similarly, I find some solace in the knowledge that I will get to Thailand one day, and I shall sit perspiring on that canal and think of Trevor and the flight I didn’t take one night in college. And I am weepingly grateful that my curve continues to extend upward.