A few days ago, I walked into the venue long before the shift started. The main floor was empty, quiet, and smelling faintly of floor cleaner. Walking past the open door of the girls’ locker room, I caught a glimpse of a face. Muscle memory kicked in—I gave a quick, automatic wai and kept walking toward the admin office.
A second later, the realization hit me like a physical blow. I stopped in my tracks.
It was Poy.
If you’ve been around long enough, you know the name. Poy wasn’t just a former colleague; she was a blueprint. Right after the pandemic, she did what every girl in this city dreams of: she got the golden ticket. She left the country with her boyfriend, got married, and completely vanished from the radar. In her absence, she became a localized myth—the ultimate, untouchable success story for a whole generation of girls who arrived after she left.
And yet, here she was. Unannounced. She was standing by a dented metal locker in cheap, baggy elephant pants, having just hurriedly pulled a t-shirt over her head.
She looked at me and offered an awkward, apologetic smile. The silence in the room stretched until it became heavy. I stood there, paralyzed by a thousand different questions, unable to choose which one to ask. To fill the unbearable pause, she broke eye contact and began pretending to search for something invisible at the bottom of her locker. Just then, another girl walked in from the hallway. She stopped dead in her tracks, her eyes darting wildly between Poy’s face and mine, completely in shock. The tableau was getting ridiculous. I just nodded, turned around, and walked away.
The truth is, quiet returns like this aren’t unusual. This city is built on the cyclical gravity of people coming back. Poy was a close friend, and I always loved her, but I loved her the way you love a favorite musician—for her absolute fearlessness and her relentless hunger for adventure.
What I saw by the lockers wasn’t a tragic defeat. It was simply the brutal, unsentimental reality of life. One grand adventure ended. A new one was beginning. The most striking part wasn’t even that she came back. It was that she stood there, fully aware of her own mythical status, completely unafraid of shattering the illusion. She was ready to put on the uniform, step out onto the floor, and start all over again.
History always loops back on itself in Pattaya. The neon grid has a way of pulling us back to where we started.
As we close out another Sunday, we hold onto the hope that maybe, one day, we will build a legend of our own. And we hold onto the understanding that if we ever have to come back and build it all from scratch a second time, we will find the courage to do it.
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