Today is my late grandmother's birthday. Happy birthday, Grandma. What a wonderful day it is. I wish you were here to see it.
I'm sitting in this army trailer that I've temporarily occupied, parked in the jungle in the front lot of the house I'm helping to renovate. I’m nursing fifteen mosquito bites on one arm. I just watched one suck the blood from me, two actually, two on different parts of my arm at the same time, and it finally motivated me to light one of the toxic repellant coils I bought at the hardware store.
Today I swam two miles, out from Lanakai Beach and through the ocean to a small island off the windward coast. The swim was exhausting. Parts of my body were numb halfway through it. I was floating there, in the teal blue choppy water, swimming against the current, for over an hour before I reached the island. I’d float for a moment, listening to the sand move on the bottom of the ocean. There were shallow reefs lining the path, a few fish and a large sea turtle with a crusted sandy shell. When we reached the island I’d forgotten how to walk. Numb and exhausted and my body swaying like I was still in the waves. I sat in the sand talking to my friend Joe for a while, both of us lying down and looking at each other and talking about nothing, about Canada, about New York, about never leaving Hawaii. His beard was sandy and his teeth were shiny and his little dimples made his skinny frame seem handsome. I felt like I was on a different planet. I built a sundial and rolled around in the sand. Completely unaware of boundaries, of time and pressure and anxiety. We only knew that we had to be back by the time the sun went down.