Who Needs Sleep Anyway?

I spent most of the morning looking up friends on Google. It was fun, because I haven’t done it in a while and I unearthed a lot about some people I haven’t heard from in quite a while. For instance, one of my old student workers from UC, Sam Tyx, is now a Youth Pastor for a university in Iowa. A former co-worker, Amanda Zeiders, has a blog. The most interesting thing I found, however, was this song (right click+ “Save As” to download)

The musician in question is a friend who lives in England. He wrote me several years ago to tell me that he’d fallen in love with a girl from Thailand who was studying as his hospital as part of some international medical exchange sort of thing. At least I think that’s what it was. I could be wrong. Anyway, at the end of that summer, he wrote me to say that her visa had expired and she had to return home. She had thought of staying, but her home hospital made her an enormous offer; one that was just too good to pass up.

She had almost stayed, though. For him. Sometime after that, he wrote the song above.

A couple of years passed, and we passed e-mails. He’d mention the girl from time to time. He said he wished she had chosen to stay. He said he wished he had chosen to go with her, but the obligations of life in England were too great. Even still, given the chance again, he might have chosen differently.

At the beginning of this summer, my friend e-mailed me to say that he had signed up to be a project manager for a medical relief team that would spend several months scouring the wilds of Borneo in search of people who needed assistance and training and supplies. That sort of thing. Every few weeks, he’d send a mass mailing with explicit descriptions of what had happened and what was going on. He talked of the people he’d met and the experiences he’d had. One night, while sleeping in a hammock near the top of some strange hill in the middle of nowhere, he heard something “large and hungry” snooping around outside of his tent. He hear the thing move closer to his hammock and, just before the thing was about to pounce, there was a noise in the distance. The thing bounded off, and a few seconds later, he heard the screams of some wild animal as it took has place as “dinner” for the thing that had so recently hunted him.

It was all good stuff.

He wrote later to say that, when the group left to return to their various homes around the world, he took some extra time and made a trip to Thailand. He wrote to say that he met the girl with whom he had spent the best summer of his life. He said they toured around her city for endless hours, happy just to be together again. In his last e-mail, he said he was awake the evening before his flight was scheduled to return to England. He said he’d been given that second chance. He said he wasn’t sure, but he was thinking of staying this time. I haven’t heard from him since.

I hope he stayed.