Hello sparklefaces,
I have a long-ass essay for you today. This took me weeks to write, so make yourself a cup of something hot and delicious and settle in. If you loved last week’s “What Offline Healing Looks Like,” you will enjoy the deeper exploration of grief and rage and love and finding ourselves in the terrifying abyss. Also, Hawaii! Also, whales!!
You can read about half of it before the paywall. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you for supporting my work. If not, I hope you consider it. There’s also a 7-day free trial option.
I tiptoe out of the room, where he is still sleeping, soft white sheets against his broad shoulders. The open windows that we never shut and the fan we never turn off billow the linen curtains, a bright green baby gecko darting up the wall.
This bed is smaller than the one at home. Suddenly, I understand my grandparents sleeping in a full-size bed for decades. I don’t mind waking up every morning to excavate myself from under his heavy legs and veiny arms. That spot on his tan neck where the barber used a straight edge to create the perfect fade. I hesitate for a moment, wanting to press my lips against the skin and stubble and breathe in his scent.
The island has been awake for hours already or never gone to sleep. Last night’s Coqui frogs and crickets seamlessly blend into the screeching of roosters and mynah birds. And always, always the ocean. Throwing itself onto the rocks endlessly. The entire island a white noise machine buzzing and calming at once.
The morning dawns grey and green, the air already mild and humid, soon bitter with coffee and sweet with warming soil, waxy green leaves of plants I don’t know the names of, and orange Hibiscus flowers as big as my face. I pull on the hot pink summer dress from the day before and sneak out of the cottage, coffee cup in hand. On the road down to the bay, I meet wandering ducks and feral cats; a mangy dog stares at me, standing in the middle of the road. A goat somewhere announces the day. On the corner, Pat, shirtless and leathery, already sits in a rickety lawn chair on his driveway, guarding his racks of kayaks and boards. We lift our coffee cups and nod.
I find the small cove, sit on the flat rock someone else put just so. I imagine my heart falling into step with the waves, my breath deepening, my eyes resting on the ocean so still in the distance and so rough at my feet. I don’t see the sun because it rises behind the hillside at my back, touching the clouds on the horizon in front of me. Peach and blush, a shimmer of pink. The ocean blue and turquoise, heaving layers of white foam, trying to reach my toes with the black sand under my nails, pink polish splinters hanging on for dear life.
I’m still salty and sandy from the day before, but I just sit there with my real face and my real body and my real heart and feel full, like that void, the black abyss, the endless crack right down the middle of me is filled by everything that’s growing and dying around me.
I’m touching the youngest place on earth, a mere million years old, still expanding, growing, evolving in real time. Everything can kill you here, or at least fuck you up real good. The volcanoes and riptides, the tsunamis and steep cliffs, the windy roads with zero streetlights, the sharks. And yet, everything is growing, not in a rebellious “I’ll show you” kind of way but with the urgency of a tree sapling racing toward the light, as if knowing there are no guarantees and somehow being fully accepting of this reality.
A tiny jungle grows around and inside every rusted-out car too expensive to get off the island. Hordes of feral chickens patrol the streets. Wild pigs, cats, and goats stroll through residential neighborhoods. Geckos in every house, giant venomous Hawaiian centipedes and tiny loudmouth Coqui frogs in every dark backyard. The ocean full of yellow tang and bottom feeders and tiger sharks and magnificent humpback whales. The wet green grows into oceanside mansions and dilapidated shacks, homeowners cutting out squares of roof to make room for papaya trees, picking avocados as big as a baby’s head, while watching tiny hummingbirds being swallowed whole inside the red beaks of the Heliconia flower. Every residential hillside built on black rock and overtaken by jungle, the humidity warping and darkening and softening every piece of wood, every slab of siding, every rickety chair.
It's nothing like the sharp, clear air at home, the jagged peaks, the straight angles of streets and avenues, the walkways shoveled, the fences freshly stained as per HOA rules, the houses small boxes of heat on the icy plane. There are no HOA rules here. Just warning signs about all the ways you can die.
I am content in this moment. I don’t need as much as I thought. A morning walk, a cup of coffee, my favorite thrift store dress. And the ocean at dawn.
I don’t miss the TV, email, or social media, the sugar I crave to soothe me, the distraction I seek to numb myself, the adrenaline of worry and drama, the validation of work, the mainland hustle of proving my “good-enough-ness” or “not-too-much-ness.” I feel just right.
I give up on straightening my hair, embrace the frizz. I go to the beach in a bikini so I can feel the water on as much skin as possible. I clean the gecko shit off the dishes without worrying that I’ll get salmonella.
On the plane, I’d read “The In-Between” by
, and this sentence was my biggest treasure: “Our problem, then, is not one of impatience, but entitlement.” Right after that, the pilot comes on. Sorry to inform you that we can’t land at Kona airport because there are cracks in the runway that need to be fixed. We were diverted to Honolulu, no hotel beds left on the entire island. Too many earlier flights, too many tired passengers. We scrambled to lock in an overpriced Airbnb downtown and crammed outside with all the other passengers waiting for Ubers.My shoulders dropped as soon as I stepped into that Hawaiian air. We’d had a fight on the plane we were both too tired to continue. We shared our last protein bar, while balancing our bags on a narrow traffic island, cars rushing by us and exhausted parents carrying limp toddlers drooling over their shoulders. We laughed at the absurdity of the situation and also the absurdity of considering these problems in a world of real problems, a slew of memories and inside jokes already forming between us. He looked at me and apologized for what he’d said earlier, then pulled me in close, my cheek against the spot on his chest that feels like home.
Then we got into the wrong Uber.
Our driver, a transplant from Brooklyn, dreadlocks to his waist and wearing a top hat, blasted metal and sang along loudly. None of us realized the mistake until the driver’s actual passengers called and cussed him out. I expected a screaming match, but he just chuckled and turned around.
And that’s when I realized I rarely feel entitled to places and things being or going my way. I accept bad luck, and accidents and forces of nature and errors. But, oh, how I have felt entitled to the people around me being and acting a certain way. I would have lost my shit on the rude passenger and felt justified about it. I said as much to our driver, and he responded that it didn’t bother him at all, and I believed him.
Some people wear shirts announcing to the world that they’re “unfuckwithable” or give “zero fucks,” and, well, we all know it’s bullshit. But this guy was not phased at all.
I’ve spent years imagining relationships that had nothing to do with reality, trying to manipulate and manage and negotiate and be passive-aggressive and directly aggressive and playing the victim and punishing “bad” behavior and refusing to get off my high horse and giving unsolicited advice. I thought being patient meant waiting long enough until other people got their shit together to be the way I wanted them to be. I thought being patient meant that at the end of my long-suffering waiting period, I’d be rewarded with the outcome to which I was obviously entitled.
In the first phone conversation with my friend Emily, after I’d ghosted her for over a year, I apologized for my shit ways and she said: “I’m not entitled to your friendship.” I sat in my car at the cemetery where I wanted to walk, but it was raining, and so I just stared through the window shield at the darkening trees. How was she able to let go like that without closure, without wondering, without harassing me for the reasons, or judging me as a person, or getting stuck in some wild stories? She just kept living her life and doing her work and spending time with her other friends and being happy and sad and all the things.
I told her, “It wasn’t about you.” She just said, I know. And I thought, yeah, but HOW did you know? How did you not think there was something wrong with you? How do you have connections that don’t always result in annihilation or abandonment? And how do you stay with yourself when they do?
After that conversation, I practice. When I feel resentment or anger come up in my relationships, I look at the person and say in my head: I’m not entitled to a relationship with you. Strangely, it allows me to soften enough to loosen my grip on wanting things to be different, wanting them to be different, wanting them to treat me differently, wanting to feel differently around them, wanting them to fill that hole, that void, that empty yawning endless abyss, where you never hear the rock hit the bottom if you throw it in.
Because sugar and work and funny IG videos are pretty good, but do you know how many people I’ve thrown into the abyss of me?
I tied my unrealistic expectations around their necks and bound their feet with baggage from the wounds they didn’t inflict but were definitely responsible for tending to, shoved rage and resentment and obligation in all their pockets. I pushed them in, and they fell like stones into my abyss. Do you know how many people I’ve thrown in there, and still, they have not stacked up to reach the top of this deep crack inside of me?
The cracks in the Kona runway were there days before we tried to land. They chose not to fix them. Then the rains came, floods eroding the ground and splitting open the cracks so wide it was too dangerous for planes to land, so they had to take action.
I knew about my crack too, have always known. Thought I was the only one with a crack, damaged goods. Sometimes, I convinced myself the crack was other people’s fault, and so I threw them in, yelling, “Fix it! Fix me!” as they fell. Sometimes, I thought the crack was my fault, and so the shame made me ignore it or distract myself so I wouldn’t have to look at this ugly, deep, raggedy hole in the center of me that I didn’t know how to fix. I thought I was broken, cracked forever.
The year before, we’d come to the island for the first time. I swam in the ocean for the first time. I moved from living in theory to living in practice. Instead of standing at the shore of my own life, I got in the water. I thought I’d figured it all out. I was finally in it. But I fought the ocean the entire time. And I paid for it in scrapes from sharp rocks and burning eyes and salt in my lungs from swallowing gallons of fish pee and losing my bathing suit and getting hammered in the face by waves, because I refused to dive into this terrifying organism. As if my tiny floating head, bobbing precariously above the surface could keep me safe. It could not. But for someone who’d always talked about the ocean and wanted to live by the ocean and loved the ocean and would never fucking stop telling you about it, it was a big deal to finally get in it.
I had no idea it was only the beginning. If this had been a movie, that ocean scene would have been way too obvious foreshadowing.
That entire year I would be in the ocean of my life, getting smashed in the face by walls of salt water, coming up for air, choking, only to be pulled under again. I’m glad I didn’t know what was coming. For someone who’d lived as a head on a stick, always abstracting, conceptualizing, theorizing….experiencing life meant being overwhelmed by physical sensations and intense emotions, struggling to regulate my nervous system so I could survive.
Learning to experience my actual life rather than dissociating didn’t look pretty. It looked like crying on the bathroom floor. It looked like sleepless nights. It looked like loneliness. It looked like desperately scratching into my journals. It looked like failure after failure, toddler tantrums melting the ice queen façade and teary, snot-bubble apologies for acting like a crazy bitch and screaming during breathwork and hyperventilating during therapy and smashing things at the gym to the point the coaches asked me if I was okay.
I was not.
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