I Left a Good Job and Moved to Thailand. The IRS Came With Me.

The first thing she told the immigration officer was that she was visiting for a conference.

This was technically true. There had been a conference. She had attended two sessions of it. The rest of the week she had spent on a rented scooter in the rain, eating things off sticks from carts she could not name, reading about the history of the country the way she read about every country, which was obsessively and slightly too late, since she had already been there four days before she understood what she was looking at.

That was eleven years ago. She went back three months later. And then again. And then she stopped going back to the other place instead.

Her name is Kree. She lives on an island in Thailand. She is not on vacation.

The apartment she rents is small and high-ceilinged and has a ceiling fan that makes a sound like a patient person clearing their throat. She has lived there for two years, which is the longest she has stayed anywhere since she left the job, and she has not unpacked in any meaningful sense of the word because unpacking would mean making a decision she has not made yet.

She owns a motorbike she bought used from a Canadian who swore it was reliable. She trains Muay Thai six mornings a week at a gym ten minutes up the road where the owner calls her by a nickname she has never asked the meaning of. She does not cook. She lives on street food and café breakfasts and the contents of whatever bag she grabbed on the way out the door.

She does not know how to submit a quarterly estimated tax payment without doing it twice because she panics.