I was already through security, already past the gate, already sitting in the boarding area for the Singapore Airlines flight that would take me to Tokyo Narita and then to Changi, that famously efficient airport that every frequent traveler had an opinion about.
I opened the camera, took a selfie, clean, clear, the gate sign visible in the background. Changi Airport, Singapore.
I sent it without a caption.
She called immediately. I sent it to voicemail.
She texted, "Are you really on a plane right now?"
I texted back, "Boarding in 20 minutes."
A long pause, then: Eli, please.
I put the phone in my bag. They called group two for boarding, and I got in line with everyone else.
A businessman in front of me was on his phone in Mandarin. A family behind me was organizing children and carry-ons with the particular controlled chaos of parents who'd done this before.
The line moved forward. I moved with it.
Singapore is 17 hours ahead of Seattle. When I landed at Changi on a flight that somehow managed to be both long and surprisingly manageable, it was the next morning local time.
And my first impression of the place was light. The specific quality of light in Southeast Asia that isn't like Pacific Northwest light at all. Warmer and more direct, like the sun had made a decision.
The Meridian Singapore office was in Marina Bay, that gleaming concentrated cluster of towers that was doing its level best to be one of the most impressive financial districts on Earth.
My contact there was a woman named Suki Tan, a Singaporean analyst who'd been with the Asia-Pacific operation for 4 years and knew how things worked.
You need 48 hours to adjust to the time zone, she told me matter-of-factly when we met. Do not try to fight it. Eat, sleep when you can, get some sun during daylight hours. By day three, you'll feel human.
She was right. By day three, I felt something closer to human.
By the end of the first week, I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time: present completely in the room I was in without the background hum of a marriage that was slowly coming apart filling the back of my mind.
The work was demanding in the way demanding work could be a relief. New markets, new patterns, new problems to solve.
I had a small apartment in Tanjong Pagar, a neighborhood south of the city center that had the specific energy of a place reinventing itself.
Old shophouses alongside new glass towers, hawker centers below apartment buildings, the whole compressed layering of a city that had decided to be ambitious about everything.
I walked a lot, figured out the MRT system, found a coffee place near the office run by a guy named Henry who made the kind of espresso that made you understand coffee differently.
I was building something new. It was small at first, the size of a hotel room, the size of a commute, the size of learning which MRT line went where.
But it was mine in a way that nothing had felt mine in a while.
Carol Ashworth handled the divorce proceedings from Seattle. Petra cooperated.