The night I met Yung in a Saigon alley began the way all good stories do – unplanned while on the way to food. I had just parked my motorbike after a slight miscommunication with the guard who at first waved me away and a tight squeeze through the bustling lanes next to the market recommended to me by another traveler. Yung was seated on a low plastic stool, the kind you’d trip over in the dark, with a grin so unassuming it disarmed me before I could say no to his invitation to join him after getting my plates inside. His offer came with a promise of beer and he opened the cooler to prove there was plenty.

I lied to him and told him I’d be happy to drink a beer with him. Truth is, beer is not for me. I hate the taste, but when it’s offered by a stranger with a good smile, a great story, or a laugh not too ashamed to leave the throat, I almost always accept, powering through sip after sip as if the moment itself is worth the piss taste. Don’t ask if I know how piss tastes.

I returned with my bánh xèo, sat across from Yung with an upside down bucket between us as a table, and he placed a cold Bia Saigon next to my plate. Before each sip, we toasted to something new. Yung insisted we take turns. “To a night with a good breeze,” I offered. We sipped and I ate. “To America and Vietnam being friends,” he countered. I think we landed somewhere near “to needing only a little money for the best nights,” and by then, we were too tangled in conversation to notice how quickly the cans emptied. He pulled more from the ice.

Yung’s stories were sharp and hilarious and he told them loud enough for the people parking to hear. They were punctuated by a laugh so soft it almost didn’t seem real. He reminded me of my friend Cameron who tells the funniest jokes with a straight face while the rest of us are trying to keep from dying. Yung’s voice cracked just enough to betray the weight of everything he wasn’t saying, but he didn’t linger on the heavy things – the two ex-wives he left in Japan or the children he misses but doesn’t talk to often. He spoke about his marriages like they were bad punchlines to jokes he’d long since retired. “High maintenance,” he called them, shaking his head with mock exasperation. “I’ll never by another woman anything.”

A woman rolled into the alley on her bicycle, a bouquet of fresh flowers balanced on the back. The petals caught in the focused but flickering alley light, splashing faint colors across the shadows. I asked Yung if flowers were off the table now, too, after everything. His laugh this time was louder, crisper, as though the idea was so absurd it deserved a bigger reaction.

“Especially flowers,” he said.

He didn’t explain, and I didn’t ask. I just nodded. “Especially flowers” made sense in the kind of unspoken way you understand something before the words come to you. For Yung, flowers were likely a symbol of something he didn’t need to revisit – a small, beautiful thing that had once meant more than it should have.

I didn’t object. I’ve always thought flowers come with their own quiet risks. Asking a woman her favorite flower is asking for a memory you’ll never be able to escape. Years later, when the relationship has dissolved like that corner bit of soft soap in warm water and faded out of your thoughts like excitement when routine sets in, you’ll see a sunflower on the side of a country road while driving with the windows down just to feel a breeze on a late summer afternoon, or you’ll see a Himalayan blue poppy high in the hills of Bhutan one June during the toughest trek of your life and be thrown back to the day she told you it was her favorite. Or worse – the time you stood in a tiny flower shop on a side street, running your thumb along the petals of a last bloom, wondering if spending your last few dollars was worth it. It was then.

I didn’t tell Yung all this, but I think he knew. His eyes, low and happy, darted between me and the bouquet on the bike as he shook his head, likely agreeing with what I didn’t say. There was a swallow left in both our cans. “To life being too short to worry about things like flowers.”