Behind the Story: Chapter 5 — Red Dress Night

November 2004

The Chapter

From Cambodia, Darren crosses into Vietnam and finds himself in a country that feels louder, faster, and entirely different from what came before. Saigon brings motorbikes, street-side beer, and the daily negotiation of simply crossing the road, before the journey turns north through Hoi An and eventually Hanoi.

Along the way: a custom red silk dress, a cashmere suit, an election-night wager neither of them should have made, and one night that Darren and Lyndi still bring up years later, though rarely with the same version of the story twice. What starts as an attempt to dress up and pretend, for one evening, that they're already the adults they've been imagining becoming takes a few turns neither of them saw coming.

Chapter Five is about friendship, reinvention, and the strange freedom of being twenty-four with absolutely nowhere you need to be in the morning.

Sometimes the best nights are the ones that don't go according to plan.

Behind The Story

The Woman in the Red Dress

Lyndi wasn't supposed to become one of my lifelong friends.

We met at TCU, where we studied film together, and our friendship developed in the slightly chaotic way some of the best friendships do. She talked me into skydiving. We auditioned together for The Amazing Race. We didn't get cast, so eventually we decided to create our own version of the show instead—meeting up in Asia and figuring out the itinerary as we went.

That's how I ended up in Vietnam with her in 2004.

By then, we'd already accumulated enough history that being together didn't require much explanation. She knew me before the trip, which meant she knew a version of me that most of the people I met while traveling never had a chance to see.

The red dress came from Hoi An. She had it made there—red silk, completely impractical for two backpackers traveling through Southeast Asia. I bought a cashmere suit at the same time, which was equally ridiculous. Neither of us had anywhere remotely appropriate to wear either one.

So we invented an occasion.

George W. Bush had just won the 2004 presidential election. We'd made a deal beforehand: if Kerry won, Lyndi would plan our night. If Bush won, I would.

Bush won.

I put on the suit. Lyndi put on the dress. And for one night, two backpackers living out of their bags got to pretend they were something else entirely.

I won't walk through what actually happened once we left the room. Some of it is in the chapter. Some of it, honestly, neither of us remembers identically anymore—which is its own kind of proof that it was a good night.

What I will say is that the red dress became something more than an outfit in my memory. It became a snapshot of two people who were young enough to believe they had all the time in the world.

We never dated. We never needed to.

Twenty years later, Lyndi is still one of the people who can remember who I was before I became the person writing this book.

Maybe that's why the night made it into the story.

Not because it was the most important night of the trip. Because sometimes the seemingly insignificant nights are the ones that survive.

What I Know Now

At twenty-five, I thought the important parts of a journey were the places you went and the things you did. The older I get, the less certain I am that's true.

Some of the memories that have lasted longest aren't the ones I would have predicted at the time. They're the ridiculous nights, the people you didn't know would still be in your life twenty years later, the moments that seemed temporary because everything at that age seems temporary—including, maybe especially, the version of yourself you're trying on that night.

We put on a suit and a dress because, for a few hours, we wanted to feel like the people we imagined we'd eventually become. I didn't know yet how many more nights like that one were still ahead of me—new country, new job, new version of myself, tried on the same way we tried on that dress and that suit, to see if it fit better than the last one.

I didn't know that night in Hanoi would still matter two decades later. I didn't know Lyndi would still be my friend. I certainly didn't know I'd eventually write about either of them.

Maybe that's the thing about being twenty-five: you don't yet know which moments are memories in the making, and you don't yet know which costumes you're wearing are actually rehearsals for who you're about to become.