I passed the border guard my passport, and with a quick glance at my papers and my face, my passport was stamped and I was back in Thailand, making my way to Bangkok to catch my flight back to the States. It had been a whirlwind tour, taking me five weeks to do the research I needed for my project. With my bag thrown on top of the bus, I looked out the glassless window as Cambodia drifted further and further away from me. When dust and the faint shapes of the border crossing melded into one, I turned my attention to the see the landscapes I had seen five weeks ago running in reverse. It was too bizarre for me to make any real sense of. The dogma of time was lost when I left JFK airport, and I never retrieved it again. Rewind, fast forward, rewind. There was no real temporality to my journey at all; too many things had happened, too many people had become a part of me. I looked out the window again, there was that same family working on the same plot of land I had become intrigued by on my journey to Phnom Penh. The same little boy looked at the bus and waved to us, I waved back, again. Déjà vu? Was I caught in a time warp that wouldn’t let me go? Where had I gone? What am I going back to now? I closed my eyes and let my mind drift backward, or maybe it was forward, to when I first began my journey six weeks ago.

Zipping my Northface rucksack, the worried eyes of my family watched as I scantily packed a bag that would take me through six weeks of life in Southeast Asia. Amid glances of concern and repeated attempts to talk me out of this trek, I tied a grey bandana on my head, and slung the bag over my shoulder. They resigned; I wasn’t going to change my mind. My family saw me off at the airport, waving, looking solemn as if I were never to be seen again. To them, Cambodia was as dangerous as 1970s Vietnam. They had convinced themselves that I would never return. “What if you get thrown in a Cambodian prison like in that movie?” my mother asked me. “You’re going to get some strange disease I know it. You’re going to die.” She was quite dramatic about the whole thing. My step dad, the essence of calm and collected reassured her, “For goodness sake, she’s going on a trip, not to war. She’ll be fine, she’s smart, can take care of herself…” His voice tapered off as I saw him feeling a bit unsure as well. He too saw Cambodia as an exotic and forbidden place that a woman of 24 shouldn’t undertake alone. Yet, at the airport, I turned around once again, casting a reassuring glance their way before being wanded at the security checkpoint. I was beyond the point of turning back; I had too much to prove, if only to myself.

The Bangkok airport was as familiar as I remember it, and the air still smelled as horrid as I remember. I managed to allocate a cab to take me to Khoasan Road, where I spent many a happy evening on my last journey to Thailand a year ago. The backpackers in open front pubs were as friendly as I remembered them, and I spent several hours drinking Chang Beer and chatting with a group of Norwegian backpackers who had been on the road for over four months. Yes, I was back in my element, the person I could never be when at home or at school. Completely relaxed, I headed back to my hostel and put down for a few hours sleep. Tomorrow I would have to leave Khoasan Road behind, and make my way to Phnom Penh, where my research would begin.

It was easy enough to procure travel to Cambodia; the lobby downstairs offered a bus to Phnom Penh for 900 Baht, about $25. I grabbed some breakfast and waited for our bus to arrive, and sure enough, only an hour late, a ramshackle van converted into a bus pulled up and anxious backpackers loaded in. It would take us 30 hours to get to Phnom Penh; we had plenty of time to get know one another. I pulled out my itinerary again, read through my research notes, and jotted some thoughts into my travel journal. By 11 that night, I was exhausted, my neck hurt, there was no way to lay down, and something unpleasant had decided to bite me in the leg, causing a rash and the most painful, irritating itch I believe I have ever had. My Liverpudlian companions had the foresight to bring cards and a bottle of scotch; I didn’t see a point in being asocial, so I too joined in the card playing.

After a few hours of restless sleep, I gazed out the window at the sun coming up, stretching across the haggard Thai landscape. They say that in Asia, the Vietnamese plant the rice, the Thai tend the rice, the Cambodians watch the rice, and the Lao listen to it grow. The busy families, children, pregnant women, elderly, all up with the sun, working. A small boy looked at our bus passing by. He turned around and waved, I waved back to him; he smiled and continued working. I lazily watched the sun beat down on the earth and I dozed back off before being rudely awakened by border guards.

A few American dollars later, we were back on our way, the Kingdom of Cambodia’s fresh stamp in my passport. What I had perceived as the distinctly Thai landscape was redundant on the Cambodian side of the border. Yet, little by little, I saw the changes in land. Devastated forests victim to a growing and often illegal timber industry marked patches off the unending landscape. Poverty-stricken families sat sullen by the side of the road, yet seemed oddly content. Families further down the road, appearing slightly more affluent, tended their land much as the Thai family I had seen.

I eventually arrived in Phnom Penh, I don’t know when or how. Exhausted from an inability to sleep properly on the bus, my joints ached, my stomach growled, and I had a headache from the heat. Dropped off in the more popular tourist area, the Boeng Kak east side, and with a few less riel than I had begun, I had managed to check into what would be my next few nights accommodations. Fearing I would be wasting the day if I simply went to bed, I hired myself a cyclo to take me to a few spots in Phnom Penh.

Sprawling, urban, and remarkably transitional, I couldn’t help but remain awestruck by the capacity Phnom Penh had for survival. The Royal Palace, the Cambodian Museum, and a few wats later, I grabbed some food at a small restaurant and journeyed back to my room for a good night’s sleep. However, I hadn’t planned on running into Felix and Nick, two of my new friends from Liverpool. They weren’t going to have it any other way than me going out with them for a few laughs. Well, I was trying to get a handle on contemporary Cambodia, this still fit into my research plan right? Sure it did.

The next morning or maybe the next, I still can’t be sure, I felt that time was slipping further and further away from me. I didn’t really know what date or day or time it actually was. I figured I’d only been gone from the US for a few days, maybe a week. I knew it was hot, so I hadn’t been gone too long, but I felt oddly comfortable and much older, I chalked it up to the jet lag and exhaustion. Dropping a quick email to my family, I told them I was alive, not in prison, and doing fine. I needed to start my research today, so I made a quick stop at the Documentation Center to schedule an appointment with a historian for the next day, and then on to Tuol Sleng to get my bearings, or so I thought.

I had been to concentration camps in Poland. Moved beyond words and into tears, the camps at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek were painful memories. The tact of those museums did not prepare me for the museum at the Tuol Sleng, or S-21 Prison. Pictures of prisoners all who met their deaths, documentation, photos of mass graves, skulls, all of it was just too much. There was no separation between me and death like there had been in Poland, although I was much more intimately connected with it. Still, years flashed through my mind and books read, months of academic preparation could not set my thoughts at ease. I began to lose myself in time. Where was I?

Sitting outside, gathering my thoughts, I watched a man of about 80 sweeping the sidewalk outside the prison. Bent over, weighed down with age, his even motions with the broom restored balance and calm to my overworked mind. Each step, a bit erratic, moved him along the sidewalk. He kept sweeping, three small strokes and one large, a step forward, three small strokes and one large, a step forward. He continued this way, completely unaware or perhaps simply not caring that dirt had already resettled on the path he had just swept. Restored to some semblance of calm, I looked around a bit more, to the sky, to the other visitors, and then I listened intently. I couldn’t hear the sound of the straw brushing roughly over the concrete sidewalk. When I looked toward the sidewalk, the elderly man was gone, and then I heard him sigh. He had sat down beside me and I didn’t even know it.

“Where are you?” he asked me. “I’m fine,” I answered, thinking he meant to inquire about my well-being. “Hm, no, where are you?” I stopped and looked at him, puzzled. A slight smile drew up the corners of his mouth, the lines around his eyes and on his brow wrinkled with the drawn cheek muscles. “I don’t know,” I answered him. Being unable to look into his eyes, I looked at my hands, fidgeted slightly, and then he sighed again. I looked up to see him squinting at the sun, pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbing the sweat from his brow. “Where are you?” I asked him, trying to be as friendly with him as he had been with me. “Oh, my dear, it is not a matter of where I am, but when I am. Some days, I wake up and find myself a child, laughing and playing, watching my mother as she cooks, and some days I wake up thirty years old, with children of my own, and then some days, I wake up and find myself an old man…. I like that the least.” He chuckled slightly at his own joke, and I was amazed at his command of the English language. “Tell me,” he began, “am I really as old I think I am?” “How old do you think you are?” I countered. He laughed slightly, “I don’t know, how old do I look?” He was baiting me so I answered, “well, I’d say you were about thirty-five, give or take a year or so.” “Oh! You are too kind!” But that was all it took for us to become friends.

“My name is Daong, what is yours?” he asked me. “I’m April.” “Oh, I see, like the month… tell me April, why are you here?” I tried to carefully explain what had brought me to Cambodia. I didn’t want to offend anyone, but I felt the need to be honest. I had come to Cambodia to do research on the Khmer Rouge, the genocide in the 1970s. The smile disintegrated from his face, and he looked at me much more seriously, and much older than he had previously. “Yes, that was a terrible time. I am lucky, so many were not.” He began to tell me his story. During the 1970s, he was a university professor, teaching British Literature. He was married with four children and one on the way. Devoutly Buddhist, he told me of the life he had in the early 1970s. And then he stopped, and started over again.

“When I was young, the French were in control in Cambodia. It was always as if someone was here, who shouldn’t really have been. First, it was the French, then it was the Japanese during the war, and then it was the French again. We learned French in school, and my sisters went to France to live after they married French soldiers right before they left for good in 1953. Yes, it was a good time. We were on our own, ready to show the world that we could be as great as many of these other countries.” He paused slightly, and looked at me for a moment, tilting his head to the left slightly. “You remind me of my eldest daughter.” He resumed his story again, at a different place than he had left off.

“I started working here five years ago. And I knew I had to keep working here because there has to be something here that I can hold onto.” His cryptic message eluded me, his story was out of time, as was I. We drifted. “I hear now that they will try the last of the Khmer Rouge for what they did here. Soon, soon there will be justice. I have to wait until then.” Not understanding completely, but I felt that this old and diminishing man was waiting for that trial, that he couldn’t go anywhere until there was justice, but I did not know what connected him so deeply with what happened. After lighting a cigarette, he took a few deep drags and began talking again.

“I married my Ek-Tan when I was only seventeen years old. We were very happy. Soon, we had many children and we lived well in Phnom Penh. I worked at the university, my children, my four beautiful children, were so happy.” He stopped and didn’t say anything more, puffing away on his cigarette. I looked down, shuffled my feet, and waited for him. I, myself, had no idea what to say to this man. Instead, I tried to put his story together chronologically, to make some sense of it. When I thought I might have figured it out, he continued once more.

“And then one day, they came, they emptied the city out, and we all ran away to the countryside. Day after day we marched, looking for somewhere to go. There were so many of us, and we did not know who this Pol Pot was or what he wanted with a whole city, why it should be empty. I had to find out, so I hid my family, my pregnant wife, my four children, deep in the forest, and I went to learn what was going on.” He stopped again, wiping his brow with his dirty handkerchief.

“Finally, the Vietnamese came and Pol Pot was forced out, and everyone could move back into the city. But it was too late for many of my friends and family. I talk to some of them now and they do not understand what happened. My youngest son Laozet did not want me to leave that night and he cried fiercely. He was but three years old. He still does not understand.” I was puzzled, “but you’ve explained it to him right? That you had to leave, so you could find out what to do, so you could save them. He understands now, right?” He smiled at my innocent remark and shook his head, “no, I explain it to him everyday, but he cannot understand, the dead cannot understand at all.” At once, I was struck by the implication of his statement. The gaps were never filled in, but I imagine what had happened, the Khmer Rouge had probably found his family and taken them to be killed. They were the family of an intellectual, an enemy of the new regime who wanted to start again with a blank slate in their culture.

Daong stood up, and I knew to follow him. We walked inside and he pointed to a set of pictures on the wall. A woman, young and beautiful, stripped of a happiness I knew she once had, three young girls, perhaps between 5 and 15, and one little boy of 3, their solemn faces knew their own fate. Daong looked up at the pictures and then he looked at me. “We are both here for the same reason.” He was right. The time passed, I’m almost sure of it, but slower than I could even imagine. Time ceased to exist, for him and for me. We were both waiting now, waiting for justice that would hopefully bring some peace for those waiting, for him and for me.

I stepped outside the compound as the staff urged me out, they were ready to close, but I was not ready to leave. I couldn't leave yet, not without telling Daong goodbye. I turned around to see him sweeping again, three short strokes and one long, a step forward. He stopped to look at me and I stared back. I couldn’t smile at him, but when he smiled and waved at me, I returned both gestures. He was the first that I would talk to, but not the last.

The bounce of the bus on the bumpy, uneven road aroused me from my dream or was it my reality. We had arrived back into Bangkok; I was dropped off at the same point where I had left. The same backpackers were in the same open-front restaurants. This time, I slept and dreamed or maybe I was awake and thinking, I’ll never know. Time reversed, playing its evil tricks on my ability to discern today and yesterday from tomorrow. Back on a plane set for home, I pulled out my notes and my journal. There were no dates in my journal; I didn’t really know when or where anything was. “Where are you?” he asked me. I still do not know.