Hey everybody. It is me. Last year, we released four episodes featuring essays from Off Assignment.

Off Assignment is a non-profit online literary magazine, and they describe themselves as having a

penchant for journeys and a fascination with strangers.

They are great. I highly encourage you to go check them out.

And today's story is by someone who might sound a little bit familiar to you.

It is our place's editor, Diana Hubble.

Her story ran in the off-assignment column called Letters to a Stranger.

I think you will all really enjoy this one. So once again,

Atlas Obscira goes off assignment. Here's the episode.

Everything about you was loud. Loud colors, loud laugh, loud voice with a rough around the edge's accent you had carried from a small town in England to the common room of that Bangkok hostel.

All of the guests except for the two of us were wearing faded t-shirts purchased for 200

bought. I was in what my 23-year-old self thought was an office get-up,

a rumpled button up and a polybend pencil skirt that was an inch or two shy of respectable.

You were a platinum blonde bombshell, with gold hoop earrings I could have fit my fist through.

We would never have been friends in our

respective lives back home. But there we were in a cement-floored bar where neither of us

belonged. A part of me wanted to dislike you, but I couldn't really. I saw myself as different,

a serious professional, even though I had never held a serious job. I had moved to Thailand

two weeks earlier on a whim, and the consequences of my impulsive decision were already crashing down.

I had no home, no friends, a few hundred dollars dwindling in the bank. Each night I fell asleep

in a ten-person dorm, clutching my purse like a stuffed

toy, then woke up and said about the laborious business of pretending my shit was together.

...