The condensation on the pink glass bottle of Spy Classic dried up twenty minutes ago. The sweet, carbonated wine cooler is now unpleasantly warm, flat, and entirely useless at helping her escape this plastic patio chair.
It is Friday night, which means it is exactly the same as every Friday night for the last two years. Her husband sits three feet away, deeply immersed in a loud, rapidly spoken English conversation with his expat friends. Early on in their relationship, he would occasionally pause, turn to her, and translate the punchlines of their jokes. He stopped doing that months ago, and she stopped caring. She already knows the jokes anyway.
When she first started attending these weekly backyard barbecues, she genuinely thought the repetition was some kind of strange Western cultural game. Why else would grown men repeat the exact same memories, with the exact same dramatic pauses, every single week? But eventually, the quiet realization set in. It wasn’t a game. This is just their loop. They are all aggressively pretending that this is fun.
She unlocks her phone. The screen’s blue light reflects in her dark eyes, offering a narrow, glowing portal out of the backyard. She opens TikTok.
Swipe.
The first video is a friend from a high-end KTV lounge, laughing and waving a crumpled receipt at the camera. The total is forty-eight thousand baht for a single table. The background is a vibrant blur of neon lights and expensive vodka bottles.
In the physical world, the volume of the men’s voices suddenly rises. They are arguing about the Super Bowl.
Swipe.
It is a video from Ing, a girl she used to work with. The camera pans across a stunning infinity pool at a luxury island resort. There is a heavily chilled glass of crisp white wine resting next to a plate of massive, perfectly grilled ocean prawns.
In the backyard, someone loudly drops another batch of gray, rubbery supermarket steaks onto the charcoal grill. A bald man takes a sip of his beer and launches into his story about how cows are fed in Australia. She stares blankly at the fence. This is the ninety-fourth time she has heard the Australian cow story.
Swipe.
The algorithm delivers a young girl from her home village who just moved to Pattaya three months ago. The girl is posing in Central Festival, hugging a red-faced, remarkably spherical foreigner. In one hand, the girl is proudly clutching a brand-new iPhone DUO. In the other, she is holding up a pristine, pastel-colored LYN handbag. She looks entirely victorious.
Behind the phone screen, the men have abandoned the rubbery steaks and transitioned to their next scheduled topic: a heated, aggressively confident summary of international geopolitics.
She takes a tiny sip of the warm, syrupy pink liquid. She doesn’t necessarily want to be in the neon KTV, and she doesn’t want to be the young village girl with the new LYN bag. She just desperately wants the clock to move forward. She locks the screen, placing the phone face down on her lap, and quietly listens to the ninety-fifth telling of the Australian cow story, trapped in a suburban Groundhog Day where tomorrow is just another yesterday.
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