Our only Pokhara trip

[fic.]

Those were the days, despite the way we lived. We lived like a family, with the boys.

Those from the Valley would crash with us in the weekends, often to spend time with their girlfriends. Which meant a grand party for us the next weekend. The nearby butcher was our friend, we'd get discounted goat mean which was mostly just bones in retrospect but he gave us the first pick of the cheap meat and cheap chicken meat and I haven't had that much chicken and rice ever since. We became experts in cooking chicken and rice, potatoes, golbheda ko achaar, and after the first year, green leafy vegetables. After Ashok got ill, the doctor said he didn't have enough minerals in his diet and that scared the shit out of us all because we never cooked or ate saag ever because that was the sort of thing they forced you to eat, not something you made by your own volition. We started cooking a lot healthier the second year, even had fruits once or twice a week, eggs a couple of times, and it felt like we had been all grown up. Our parties started becoming less ratchet more adultlike, the cheap vodka and rum were replaced by cheap whiskey and beers, people started bringing booze and other gifts to our parties, the decorations on our walls came up, thanks to the girlfriends who wanted to be seen at a more respectable place.

We were too poor to go out of valley, to pay for the hotel rooms while we were still paying our rent was ridiculous to us then. There was this one time we went to Pokhara and then to the base camp that everyone remembers from the time because that was the only time we went on a large extended trip. There are so many stories from the trip, so many photos were taken they still make the rounds after all these years and people ask me if it was recent. The way that trip was planned was really absurd. A friend of a friend's parents owned a hotel in Pokhara, we didn't really know who he was, and somehow three hotel rooms were arranged. All we knew was 'free hotel', and so we showed up there, the eighteen of us in the three rooms a body in every available surface. If you wanted a comfortable space to lay down, you either needed to party all night long and wait for the boys to go out for breakfast, or just not party in which case they wouldn't let you sleep anyway for being such a spoilsport. Those latenight bullshit conversations about college, the future what we wanted to do, girlfriends, families, and just shooting the shit, that was when I got to know those guys intimately. The trip was supposed to have been seven days long and it ended up at twenty-two days, but that's a story for a different time. What I will give away is it involved multiple rescue parties, a helicopter, army and police dispatch to search for us, and us acting stupidly even by our low low standards. Oh and I almost got to have sex then too, that was possibly the reason why I went along with everyone else's bullshit. You could make an entire novel out of how we all ended up there, and how things turned out, a total comedy of errors, maybe I should write that some day. And that was also the time Greta told me how much she cared for me, and -- this is important -- that she loved me. My body was light as a bird.

Every year for three weeks those of us that went on the trip share stories on the chat groups, and every year I'm discovering something new. You would get out an entire season of slapstick comedy if you filmed every episode from a different character's view.