My Week—Or Three—at The White Lotus

My cell phone rang. Danielle and Este explained that they were so sorry, but they actually had to leave. That they couldn’t push their flight after all. They had already canceled the charter that would take us to Koh Phangan, but would I be okay staying here by myself? While my mouth was saying, “No problem,” my body was frozen in the terror of finally, and literally, being alone. I looked out at the sea. The full moon rose. The Thai fishing boats, with their Gatsby green lights, chugged into place. There were major pieces missing from my life—a boyfriend, meaningful career success, children of my own. And yet a voice inside me asked a simple question: Could I be happy with everything I had in this moment, which was everything? The answer, of course, was yes.

For the rest of the trip, I woke every day at dawn, refusing to waste even one minute of my remaining time in Thailand, and more generally, on earth. If I was going to be like a character on The White Lotus, at least I wanted a redeeming arc. Dave invited me, this time personally, to come meet him and his traveling circus on their next stop. I no longer wondered if I was overstaying my welcome. I booked a ticket to Phuket.

Phuket was significantly hotter and crawling with tourists. Jellyfish the size of pizzas would wash up on the beach. We mourned the Four Seasons. We mocked ourselves for mourning the Four Seasons. It turns out that it is hard to live in the atmosphere of The White Lotus and not become the type of person The White Lotus condemns.

Every night at sunset I would join the more aquatically inclined actors and their families for a swim in the sea. I became particularly close to the heart of the crew, whom I jokingly nicknamed the Wives of The White Lotus—Iris Apatow, Emma Hewitt, and Tana Kamine. Since I was free from the obsession of my own interiority, we could go on adventures to winding alleyways full of shops and off-the-beaten-path restaurants, and take boat rides, followed by canoe rides, into bat-infested caves.

In total, I stayed in Thailand with the cast and crew of The White Lotus for three weeks. When I announced to Emma, Parker, and Dave that I was leaving, their hands flew to the sky in despair.

“Why?!” they asked me, and they had a point. I had become so disconnected from my life I didn’t really have anything to go home to—my friends in LA had started new relationships, left old jobs. I knew it was time to go when it became harder to leave than it was to stay. I texted my ex’s mom. I was finally ready to take back whatever detritus—ankle weights, a few tangled G-strings—that I had left with her son. For my last night in Thailand we had a goodbye dinner with so many people they had to give us a table inside. I had been swimming in the ocean until the very last second and was now shivering. As a last act of kindness, Walton walked back to his villa, the closest to the restaurant, to get me a shirt.

I cannot understate the surreality of later watching these same people, in this same place, transform into totally different people on television. I took the long way back to my hotel room, and got lost in the snaking outdoor alleyways between villas. Somehow I ended up back at the restaurant, where outside White was enjoying a private moment by the pool. I hadn’t seen him since Pig Island and now here I was, almost three weeks later, half wet in a bikini, covered in sand.

He turned to me, eyes bulging.

“Are you still here?”