We break the clouds, and light kicks out the windows of the plane, welcoming me back to real life. Good morning, sunshine. It's 2 PM, Hawaiian standard. The island says hello.
Bleary and barely sentient, we wait impatiently for the car, napping on stone embankments, on light posts, on each other. It's a mark of how tired we are. This is not a place of subdued colors and blended shadows. What's not worn away by the sun is strong and vibrant, and the shade of trees has edges like knives. Humid. Wet. Montana never seemed so far away.
The sun blinds, and the traffic is terrible - overcrowded, the streets filled to the brim. The roads scramble over each other in a futile attempt to achieve the pragmatism of point A to point B on an island that has neither. Even the most hardened GPS navigator cannot narrate the route we take with accuracy. To reach the hotel we must thread under and between two others, around four more, stare blankly at a parking lot with the same name, stop and ask for directions, tunnel under the earth. Sleep leaves us.
A good thing, too. Twenty stories up, the beds are singles, smaller than good couches. The toilets are a few inches lower to the ground. Window is cracked. Wallpaper is ugly. Internet is not free. The sooner we are back outside the better.
On foot, everything is different. People stare and scowl viciously - they are Native, and I am in their Native Land, and this is what has become of it. When Cook came, they stabbed him to death on the rocks before his crew.
He got his revenge.
The languorous mood is there, at least, the heat of the sun dulling the little barbs with passivity and apathy. The tourists smile and nod like tourists always do. Vacation. Yes. I can walk barefoot through the streets, the beach is never more than a few blocks away, and trinkets and trifles adorn every corner. I buy symbols without knowing their meaning, hang them around my neck with strange pride. A man outside the market forces parrots on unsuspecting passersby, takes pictures, demands money. Guilt is his sole source of income.
The term “tourist trap” is a truism, and we will not be misled – the best moments in this place are in the little things. My time here is spent in gas stations and corner stores), or on foot in winding streets with a single companion, admiring local residences and ignoring large hotels. Good food to be had at the drive-in diner. The macaroni salad is not to be believed.
And the darker it gets - the less people there are - the more alive it seems. I take my leave of the group. We are revisiting old places already.
A beautiful woman passes by me, harassed by two drunks. Never missing the chance to be a chivalrous imbecile, I place myself between her and them, readying myself to leap to her aid. Before anything real happens, she sticks out a hand and a cab swoops her up like a hawk - there in an instant, gone in a flash, with an ease that speaks of practice. The drunks shrug and meander away. I do the same. Moving on.
The beach. Nothing man could ever do to mar the brilliance of the ocean. I enter the water as the crowd leaves it, swim alone, refreshed. Though the water is salty enough to gag on it is beautiful beyond reproach. So many boats that have not come in yet. Sunset engulfs the retreating sails in a brilliant portrait of bright reds and yellows on dim blues and oranges, lighting fire to the night. What we pour into the sky only makes it prettier.
And following: the twilight, carrying as always an energy to it. What is true in one place stays true in another – light remains when the sun dies out, everything glows, and I am alive. I itch for pen and paper, for a friend, for true love, and yet I want for nothing. Electricity. It is magnified by the newness of it all, by the sensation of the water, by the vast and colorful and indifferent world around me.
In the flourescent light that follows from the hotels at my back, I dig sandcastles inches from the tide, with moats that turn immediately into sinkholes. I write hasty notes with my fingers that last only minutes. I stand in the sand and let myself sink as it dissolves, ankle deep in rich mud. The waves are large enough to drag me away - and almost, almost I wish that they would.
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