For an expat living long-term in Pattaya, the true measure of his tenure isn’t the retirement stamp in his passport or the name on his condo lease. It is the mathematical ratio of his active contacts to his LINE block list. For a seasoned resident, the block list is always at least two times larger.
He sits in the dark on his balcony, the green glow of the app illuminating his face, scrolling endlessly through a digital graveyard of over four hundred names. Every single avatar is a tombstone marking a very specific, usually disastrous, era of his local life.
There are the obvious casualties, of course. The aggressive freelancers who demanded money a week after a casual date. The two-week “true loves” that ended in spectacular, screaming public scandals outside a Tops. The girls who borrowed five thousand baht for a sick relative and immediately blocked him on Facebook, prompting him to return the favor on LINE.
But the graveyard is also full of tragic collateral damage.
Buried somewhere in those hundreds of names are the “normal” girls. The quiet cafe workers, the polite receptionists, the sweet ones he met during the day. They weren’t blocked out of malice. They were hastily, violently purged the afternoon his “special” girlfriend officially moved into his condo and demanded to audit his phone. Now that the special girl has inevitably packed her bags, taken the ricecooker, and left, he desperately wants to find the quiet barista again. But he can’t. He never typed in her real name, and her LINE profile is just a single sunflower emoji. She is lost forever in a sea of identical anonymous icons.
Then there are the panic blocks. He scrolls past a cluster of girls he actually wanted to see again, but who became victims of his own digital clumsiness. Late one night, he accidentally pasted a message from his clipboard meant for a Walking Street dancer—something tragically explicit—directly into the chat of a nice girl from a dating app. Heart pounding, unable to find the “unsend” button fast enough, his brain chose the ultimate expat coward’s way out: immediate, permanent block.
Further down are the financial archives. Dozens of Tinder and ThaiFriendly matches who immediately sent a menu of their short-time rates. He had self-righteously blocked them all during his brief, delusional phase of strict monogamy, convinced he was completely done with the transactional side of the city.
Tonight, the condo is completely silent, and the loneliness is heavy. He considers resurrecting just one person from the graveyard to grab a beer. But there is a catch. To figure out who is who behind the endless cat avatars and heavily filtered selfies, he has to unblock them and scroll up to read the old chat history.
He hovers his thumb over a random smiling face, hesitating. He realizes that opening those dead conversations isn’t just checking a name. It is ripping the bandages off a hundred tiny, embarrassing psychological wounds—confronting every drunken mistake, every pathetic argument, and every lie he ever told. He locks the screen, sets the phone face-down on the table, and decides to let the dead rest in peace.
Leave a Reply