Insect repellent

His tension made me tense, which caused me to become physically careless, which caused me to stub my toe in Hanoi, to cut my finger on his razor in Chiang Mai as I dug through the toiletries bag for toothpaste, and-one really awful night-to put insect repellent in my eyes instead of eyedrops because I hadnБЂ™t looked carefully at the travel-БЂ‹sized bottle. What I remember most about that last incident is howling in pain and self-БЂ‹recrimination while Felipe held my head over the sink and rinsed out my eyes with one lukewarm bottle of water after another, fixing me up as best he could while raging in a steady, furious tirade about the stupidity of the fact that we were even in this godforsaken country to begin with. It is a testament to how bad those weeks had become that I do not now specifically remember which godforsaken country we were in. All this tension reached a peak (or, rather, hit a nadir) the day I hauled Felipe on a twelve-БЂ‹hour bus ride through the center of Laos to visit what I insisted would be a fascinating archaeological site in the middle of the country ...»