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

When she landed in Bangkok, Kree told the immigration officer was that she was in Thailand for a work conference.

This was technically true. The conference was real, held in a hotel on the Chao Phraya River, and Kree worked there all four days. But she didn't get back on the return flight home.

The rest of that week she rode a rented scooter through the rain, ate grilled pork off sticks from carts on Khao San Road with signs she could not read, and read about Thai history the way she read about every country, obsessively and too late. Standing in front of a golden temple she had walked past all week, she finally understood what she was looking at.

That was four years ago. She went back three months later. And then again. And then she stopped going back and forth.

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

The jungle hut 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.