A former lover, the one who decimated my heart when I was in my early twenties, is dying. Prostate cancer, like my dad. Metastasized, meaning the cancer has spread, infused organs and bones. I was also twenty-something when my dad’s lips went numb, when he couldn’t feed himself, when he turned purple and ashen, then he’d fall asleep as I drove him between appointments. He should have been home resting, but he was always so in motion, he ran his last marathon two weeks before he died. Two weeks! How was that even possible?

I hear the prognosis for my ex isn’t good. And though we haven’t spoken for decades, losing him and then my dad, informed a lot of the interim. I couldn’t believe his callousness. I was astounded by how his loving feelings, like a phantom waterline with the flow suddenly disappeared, simply stopped and siphoned off.

He lived in the attic of an old Manoa house close to the university, at the top of a dark stairwell where single window spot lit the wooden floor of the landing revealing a ruby hue. Past the door, his room opened into a vaulted ceiling, and through the double-hung windows the gray branches of an albizia tree stretched above the roof. The bed was large, positioned beneath the Southern-facing light across from a ledge where he kept incense, candles, photos, and mementos—a shrine for intention and prayer. Nearby stood an easel and the working tools that went along with oils: many brushes, a water jar, mineral spirits and palates, a metal spatula and tubes upon tubes of color.

On the day he left me he wore teal and blue paisley pajamas, which seemed especially strange for the summer’s atrocious humidity, because they covered him from wrist to ankle as if a kind of armor, as if he was protecting himself from me. He had to get medicine, he said, for a UTI. I had no idea men could even get UTIs, and though I thought it strange, I didn’t question him. He wanted me gone before he got back, this man who had been my best friend for the four years prior to us hooking up, who’d made love to me that very morning. He had let me move back home two weeks before, abandoning grad school and a job—a whole life I’d built in Los Angeles. My life had been on a specific track; my trajectory a straight line towards independence and self-sustainability, and I was beginning an expedition to discover who I could be after a lifetime of ‘daughter,’ ‘kid sister,’ ‘niece.’

“I want your forgiveness. I don’t want you back,” he said to me. I was shocked. Hadn’t we planned this move together for months, this life in which we’d be each other’s everything, this love wouldn’t ever die? Hadn’t I been more than something to discard? I remember collapsing on the blood-hued floor in the middle of the triangle between the easel, the bed, and the shrine, as if in human sacrifice, some ritual meant to erase me from his life, like I’d never been at all. He did not help me up. Rather, he picked up his keys, went to his truck, and I heard the ignition start. He drove away. After some time, I stood and wobbled down the creaking stairs clutching the railing. I appeared on the road outside where there were no sidewalks, stumbling as I watched my brown leather sandals step over mangled roots, kicking up bare dirt. I wept inconsolably and aloud, like the child I was. I found my way to a bus stop, where I sat trying to keep the world from spinning. When a backpacked student arrived and stood staring at me from a distance, I realized I had to go somewhere else.

“This won’t break you,” he’d said, but he was wrong. The myth of this abandonment grew planet-sized, eclipsing my conscious and unconscious decisions to love and be loved. At first, I waited for him to realize his mistake and return to me. I tried to forgive him so I could keep him in my life, but that tendon detached when I realized he was not coming back. I became the kind of person who didn’t trust anyone, not even herself. I don’t believe he was the root of my self-hatred—my childhood was akin to a game of dodgeball with sticks—but the way he treated me certainly added evidence to the voices in my head that I wasn’t good enough, that I was unloveable, that staying safe meant never opening that way again. I futon-surfed for weeks before renting a room with a key in Kamehameha Heights from a mother and daughter who promised privacy but whose used band aids I found inside my lime-carpeted quarters. Unnerved and anxious, I tried to make enough money to move out, sleeping in shifts while I hostessed at the Pagoda from the crack of dawn to mid-afternoon, then cocktail-waitressed at the Blue Zebra from my now bedtime ‘til 2:00 a.m. Trying to keep my writing alive, I also transcribed the dream diary of a sixty-something year old guy whose boring entries contained the constant theme of eating at Roy’s Hawaii Kai and whose Portlock house seemed lavish and unattainable.

Three jobs, seven days a week was exhausting. Eventually, I saved enough to move into a two-bedroom cottage with a newly-divorced friend of a friend who ate Tums like candy, chewed a lot of gum, and co-parented an eight-year old girl. I was single for a few years, though there was a boy who liked me enough to go AWOL from the Army, hoping I’d let him live with me. But I didn’t have the bandwidth to be that girl yet. Those were the years I spent learning what hard was, what impossible felt like, the years that ended when my father died. I was thirty then, and an even deeper, debilitating grief began.

It’s been three decades since that painful morning. Three decades of loving and losing—not just my father, but my mother, too, along with many others. Over that period, the tides of life have come to my shore, have broken down the big rocks of what seemed unfathomable pain, depression, and suicidal imaginings. The desire to disappear and end the hurting have come and gone, revealing a sandy, softer space where kindness and compassion for myself and for others has bloomed, blossomed, and propagated. How did I get so lucky, to have learned these things, to be in the world with a perspective of blessings and gratitude, to get to the other side of victimhood and see how I hurt him back, finally claiming my lost luggage of responsibility for the retribution I took, for inflicting harm on him, too.

After I heard about his diagnosis, I wrote a letter. I wished him remission and happiness, love and freedom from the energetic ties that could bind us both to the same lessons in the next life. I wrote that he did not need to do anything in return and I meant it. Why? Because I wanted to honor my rough-worn path, upon which I discovered love for that girl who abandoned the logical way forward and pinned her whole hope on someone who betrayed her. She kept me safe and alive, surviving the least-expected breakup at the least-expected time—the breakup that made me wary and solemn, that for a long time, lobotomized my ability to dance and sing and trust myself. Many days, I’d wondered whether he’d loved me at all. But from this distance, I see that he certainly did, that I was not delusional. I did not hallucinate and jump off the ledge of my life without cause. And, in the aftermath, I adapted. I built myself from scratch, traded pain and anguish for purpose and wealth and the lasting love I finally found with my husband and his kids.

I edited my letter for days. I wasn’t sure I should send it. Why should I reach out when the silence had lasted so long? What did I hope to accomplish when I wasn’t sure I wanted a response, afraid of re-engaging with an energy that may attempt to hurt me again? And what good would it do to re-open the past when he probably had more pressing things to confront in his present—an ex-wife and two twenty-something kids, his community? I wrote, asking myself how a dying man who lived three thousand miles away could hurt me. What could be lost by being generous, in being kind? There wasn’t much risk in gifting him with the Hawaiian practice I’d been privately rehearsing to make things right known as ho’oponopono, which I was casting in his direction anyway—the prayer, “I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you.” And although I felt somewhat ready, I could not hit ‘print.’

I closed my journal, and a miracle happened that sometimes happens, specifically when I’m in a place of need from the universe—a speaker across the room from where I was sitting that hadn’t been used in months turned on by itself, and music began to play. The song was The Southern Cross, and the lyrics, “Spirits are using me, larger voices calling. What heaven brought you and me cannot be forgotten,” convinced me. I wept as I listened for the first time to the entire song, gulping in air, knowing I was blessed, resonating with the truth that,

We cheated and we lied and we tested.

And we never failed to fail.

It was the easiest thing to do.

You will survive being bested.

Somebody fine will come along, make me forget about loving you.

—which, after so many years of obsessively thinking about him every day, so many times a day, wishing things could have been different, wondering what I’d done and why he left me—actually happened. My heart no longer fibrillates when I hear his name, and the electrical charge associated with him is dissipating into a quieter, more sustainable beat.

It has been several days since I slid my letter into the mail slot. Those days have been filled with singing and dancing, a new-borne elation resulting from my release into the ether, a new-found appreciation and love for that time, for the post-traumatic growth that felt insurmountable in the moment, but which I ultimately overcame. I am grateful for my journey that may have never started in earnest without the impetus of his rejection, without the aid of that darkness and the light I found inside of me.

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As I grew older, even with all the cultural focus on family, I never dreamed of becoming a mother. The physical and emotional pain, the absolute relinquishing of self I saw my mom do was not something I wanted to replicate. Yes, there was beauty in forming a unique and irreplaceable relationship with a child, but I did not measure that as being more important than exploring my independence.

All that changed when my bio clock started in my late twenties and I lost the thread of going through life without giving birth. A kind of gravity that set in, a pull towards gestating that I did not expect. My body wanted to grow someone of me, and this new development defied the world view I’d invested so much thought and rationality into. Was the impetus to spawn installed as an internal mechanism meant to make my own community—a way to need and be needed? When I got lucky and found a husband who already had two kids, we talked about having our own. And until the option was no longer biologically possible, I flip-flopped about birthing a baby until I ultimately decided to not.

Now in my fifties, I’m relegated to the life I’ve got. I chose to be ‘child free,’ so I don’t have the bio kids or grandkids my contemporaries now revolve their lives around. I’ve been reflecting on my choices, and maybe I’m somewhat sad. It’s telling to be this age and see so few women without: my peers mostly chose to breed, so now have generation(s) that will remember that G-ma was cool or fun, spunky or solemn. And who knows what will happen if or when my step kids have kids of their own? Maybe this whole internal debate will be solved and I’ll get the best of both worlds without the physical trauma of having given birth, like I’ve enjoyed to this point.

I’m trying to remember that my life has been formed by silence and reflection; more solitude than noise. And sometimes that’s lonely. But it’s also freeing. I don’t have a parent guilting me into anything anymore, and my siblings have lives of their own mostly separate from mine. My kids are launched living lives on their own, I have a bunch of friends who are like family, and I’m working on adding to my tribe: an exercise that takes commitment and focus.

Just this morning, surrounded by a bunch of guys I’ve surfed with for about fifteen years, the waves were smooth and feathering perfectly. We were stunned by the ocean’s glassy perfection while beneath us, sea turtles sourced their seaweed breakfast and above, sea birds soared through the gray, sprinkling sky. I looked around as wave after wave rolled through in absolute perfection, and for the first time I noticed the number of women. There were only two, both slightly older than me—the same two who are out every morning in the same half-light, that space between moon set and sun rise, when day is brand new and sparkly.

I realized that most moms with little kids are unable to roll out of bed and set their minds to surfing. These regulars in the lineup at dusk are women about my age. There’s also one bad ass in her late sixties who beams a smile at me when I see her kayak surfing on the inside. But it’s only men who sit at the peak, vying for their turn to scream down the line. And me.

I thought of all the mornings we got up early when the kids were with their mom, when we didn’t have to make them breakfast or bus them to school, when we were free to choose our own adventure and we chose to surf because we could.

I watched as this one guy, Lionel (same name as my dad, who’s got to be in his late seventies), who’s always out whenever we’re up in time for dawn patrol. We all hooted for him as he pulled into the pit then soared like a flying fish through the lineup. I want to be like him, I thought, even though I’ve never met his wife or kids, even though I’ve never been invited to his house for Thanksgiving or Christmas. I want to live so that I’m stoked, to be out on the ocean as much as I can, to be out in the world finding the joy everywhere I’m able. Free and connected.

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Noted therapist and author talks about how her parents, survivors of the Holocaust, observed some of their contemporaries after living through the camps. Some chose to rotate their lives around the trauma they experienced, falling into despair and depression and reliving their horrific memories on repeat. Others chased Eros, pursuing their passions, and made the most of the lives they had yet to live. These people pushed past the choice to be angry, hurt, and scared, built lives out of passion, desire, and the aliveness they felt in getting a second chance. Her parents chose the later.

For my husband, surviving the tumor came with a sense of mortality—the understanding that life was not an endless resource to be wasted. He responded by going after a big promotion at work. He also wanted to do all the things he’d previously said “never” to, including a trip around the world that started in Tokyo, then winded through Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Bhutan, Greece, Venice, and Boston, before returning home to Hawaii a month later. I hadn’t before seen him try so many new foods and experiences, hadn’t watched him so friendly or relaxed. It seemed he was finding his happy through a new openness and curiosity about the world and himself. He gravitated towards creativity, began taking pictures in earnest, and embraced his talent for finding art in nature and the beauty in human forms. He opened to critique and admiration, seeking tutelage as he fine-tuned his skills.

I watched in awe as my new partner emerged. He’d always been supportive of my writing and had attended every reading I’d done, proof reading my drafts and offering constructive criticism. But whereas I’d started my creative pursuit decades earlier, his focus now far exceeded mine and his success in the realm easily surpassed mine. His exposure to the things that were making him better grew and his community expanded while mine shrank. The pinnacle of my public authorship had waned since grad school, when I’d been surrounded by writers and teachers, had dedicated whole years to learning.

My mother’s death and my husband’s diagnosis a mere eleven months afterward shook my foundation, made me afraid and risk adverse. The onset of perimenopausal brain fog meant my memory seemed to be worsening, so I stopped seeking out experiences I couldn’t recall and became more interested in buying tangible things I could hold in my hands. Insisting on too many selfies, my kids rolled their eyes and my husband sighed in annoyed resignation. I see now I was trying to capture the moment in print to someday stand in for the time when pictures would be all I’d have.

My response was likely the same as many supporters of survivors—I watched my loved ones struggle and I wanted to button up and hold still, to stay far from the ledge and survive. I’m glad I don’t have to learn what it would have been like if he’d chosen the same, aligning with my low-vibrating emotions and scurrying toward the nearest cave. Instead, he wanted to explore the world and discover what lay beyond the next horizon, to learn what it was to become his best self.

These eight years since the moment he awoke, groggy-minded into consciousness, believing the surgery had taken the estimated few hours (and not the eight that included me completely breaking down because the surgeon called me into the family room, where all the bad news that I’d ever been given with my mom had happened, to tell me that they couldn’t extract the whole tumor, that only eighty percent could be removed safely) have been a struggle between our opposite perspectives on how to live.

When we went to Bhutan, a priest predicted our future. The room was unlit, the walls all wood. Bamboo stalks lined the window as morning light stippled the honey-hued floors and the sweet smell of incense curled towards the ceiling. The priest laced through his fingers a rudrashka mala, a necklace made of one hundred and eight seeds to help the meditator keep track of the same number of mantras. He held a small book written in Dzongka, the script so small and intricate, it looked like waves flowing across the page. In stilted English, he explained that my husband would live until he was in his nineties, that he would come back in his next life as an elephant. He said I’d be a woman in my next life and knew that my younger decades had been extremely difficult. He knew about the death of my parents and my husband’s tumor, and told me that I’d been “going uphill” for a long time. But, he offered, my later life would be “like going downhill.”

I can say that the last eight years have been good to me career-wise. I’ve had better-than-I-could-have dreamed success. But career success has become my default, the place where things make sense, where I can disappear into a professional mode and not feel much. Things are rational for me at work, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Emotional epiphanies have come, and I’ve inched towards them with much effort, staggered up against myself and found that presence is the simplest answer to any question. Feeling itchy? Annoyed? Anxious? I breathe in and notice. I exhale and realize which underlying feeling is speaking. Learning Paul Ekman’s six universal basic emotions helped: happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and surprise. Whereas eight years ago, I was sad about losing my mom, afraid I would also lose my husband, caught off guard by the prospect of two potential losses instead of one, a little disgusted at the injustice of it all, and pretty angry at the process, in this moment, I am teetering towards happy, towards adventure and ease.

I want to sit with this sensation and take it in. I watch the clouds move slowly across the cornflower blue sky, the waves wash to shore, and the leaves of so many different trees sway in the breeze. I want to be right here and know that the rush for safety is my default when things go wrong, but it doesn’t have to be. I could choose curiosity, embrace uncertainty, and find wonder within the challenges that are sure to come my way. I am learning to embrace my enoughness, to calm myself and settle into my intrinsic value as a wise, connected spirit who knows things without thinking, who senses what’s true.

Anniversaries help us to get perspective, to measure the distance between where we’ve been and how far we’ve come. It’s a practice I rarely do, more focused on the challenges ahead than the accomplishments I’ve enjoyed. I don’t celebrate my successes as much as I could or as I should, and that’s something I’d like to change. But this anniversary is different. Remembering the wending road we’ve walked to get to right here and checking the distance feels like I’m finally relaxing into gratitude and understanding how much I have. It feels like reprieve, like solace, like sunlight on my shoulders and the wind at my back.

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When people say that you can make a family out of your friends, how many have made a family of friends from a single family? The Birthday Girl belongs to one of ten kids which I met at the genesis of my double digit years, the middle brother the best friend of my brother since their Freshman year. To this day, they still get together often and act like teenagers, drink too many beers and laugh boisterously.

But what makes this family so special to me is the closeness I feel or have felt with so many of them. At two separate periods in my life, I’ve claimed two different sisters as my best friend, dated the eldest brother, and felt like my brother was lost when the youngest took his life. Thirty years ago, I’d go to their high school to drive him and the youngest sister Gloria around to escape their mother who reminded me of my father. We’d get chicken nuggets or pizza, cruise Waikīkī or just park and talk. Their mom, who wouldn’t let them be much of anywhere with anyone outside the family, trusted I’d keep them safe, and I always had them home on time. The similarities between our opinionated and sometimes-abusive parents may be the trauma that initially bonded us together, but we’re nearing forty years of friendship, so I don’t think that’s the glue. Not even close.

During my weekend in Los Angeles, I spent most of my time with Gloria, who I barely get to see these days because she doesn’t live on Oahu. She seemed just born when I first met her, but is in reality not too far behind me at the age of forty-six. We drove around, walked boardwalks and beaches, ate sushi and kale salad, and I tried my first cortado which put my drip coffee to shame. But mostly we talked, our conversations wide-ranging and bittersweet. I trusted her with truths I was only beginning to glean, and I sense she did the same with me. We are travelers, I realized, on different roads with different heartaches and different joys, who remind each other of truths we sometimes forget. For me, it was that the villains of my youth were not all bad, that others may have been worse—that I wasn’t always the victim or heroine I’ve made myself out to be, having edited my narratives as I’ve gone along to survive the moment, to keep (or stop) loving the unlovable. Between my twenties and now, I’ve told myself stories that are not always accurate to keep intact and absolved, to stay guilty or guileless. Reconnecting with she who was there in real time having her own experiences and perspectives with those same characters helped me glean half-truths I’ve told myself: a valuable reality check I’m not sure everyone is privileged enough to receive.

It wasn’t all teary-eyed epiphanies. On the night of the celebration, we danced and sang in a pink and purple-lit community center, bleeding Jesus Christ on his cross floating above us, his toes touching the fabric draped across the ceiling. Everyone dressed in fifties costume, and I donned polka dots, $10 Amazon cat eye glasses, and Mary Jane’s. We watched the Birthday Girl vamp and shimmer; her spectacular presence, the reason she was crowned Miss America in 2001, constant and never dimming despite fame or a family of her own, the sixteen-year old exuding the same contagious and natural charisma as the fifty year old version.

When I returned home, road-worn and dysregulated, I woke at 4:00 a. m. instead of 6:00 and reflected on my time with my friends. I saw what I didn’t see before—that there’s a remnant of hurt and more healing to do—that the rings cut into my tree of life hold trauma that contain questions I still need to ask and answer. And I was reminded again that I’m not done growing, not by a long shot. So thank you, my sisters, my tribeswomen, for holding me by the shoulders and claiming me as your own, for naming me part of your exquisite family, for keeping me close and for loving me as I was. And as I am. You bless me with your presence and your insight, and I am so fucking grateful.

“The tempest is not evil.”

-Jedediah Jenkins

Back in my twenties, I thought that becoming a writer meant suffering. I chased boys who said they liked me and ignored (pitied?) the ones who pined for me. I spent money on coffee, cigarettes, and travel. I was frivolous, and once tested a theory that one night stands would provide me with material by sleeping with three different strangers in a single week, resulting in this single sentence and a whole lot of disappointment.

When I was twenty-four, my dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and his sickness permeated the following six years of my life with agonizing worry and grief. That period taught me that I didn’t have to search for drama. My dad died when I was thirty, and I thankfully learned early that life arrived unbidden, unwanted, in all sorts of ways I couldn’t predict and did not have to pursue.

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In my twenties, Father’s Day became a Hallmark holiday in my head created, I thought, for the sole purpose of causing brain damage for the effort of finding something to buy my dad (who needed nothing), and shrinking the contents of my wallet. Because it always came during the summer, I especially resented its impact on my discretionary spending. I had better things to do than attend a Father’s Day dinner, but I’d swing downtown for a budget-friendly lei and rock up for a free meal, enduring his admonishment to ‘be present.’  My legs bounced beneath the table with anxious energy, but I’d force myself to stay put. I could not wait to be free, to go back to my friends or my roommate, to be alone in my room—anywhere but right there.

It’s been twenty two years since I’ve had a father to celebrate Father’s Day with, and I often hear Dad’s voice in my head after a long run as he trained for yet another marathon. He’d ask me to massage his feet, to rub his back—“You’ll wish you had when I’m gone,” he’d say. At the time, I vowed to never regret declining. And yet…

I honor the sadness, the missing, on this day all these years later, when I am fatherless. I hear Dad’s laugh, see his face in my mind and the way his stoic face crinkled into a crooked toothed smile as he sang “Teeheeheeheeheeheehawn” with gusto, his nickname for me so annoying at the time, transformed over the decades into something charming and bittersweet. I miss the way he squeezed my arm and pulled my shoulder into the crook of his armpit, how he’d xerox then highlight articles for me I’d never read—the obvious and subtle ways he tried to connect that I rejected, and how lonely that must have been for him. I wish…

My dad died when he was only sixty-four and I was thirty. A lifetime has passed, and soon I will live more life without him than with him. Losing him still hurts, still feels like I’ve been cheated. We didn’t have the relationship I wanted. I doubt it was the one he wished for—but we were working on it, making attempts and making mistakes, missing and meeting each other.

There is also a freedom in his absence, permission. I got a divorce after he died—something I may not have dared with his presence, so adverse to hearing, ‘I told you so’—my pride, a barrier to my happiness. Without him, I was forced to find my own North as the gravitational pull of his opinions and thoughts ceased being a factor. Somehow, I forgave him, conversing with his memory and releasing a lot of blame. Though some operating instructions still live in me, waiting to be discovered and evaluated, retained or released, I feel softer towards him than ever.

So maybe the time since his passing has always been mine to yield, to re-form into energetic lightness and wholeness, to let this Father’s Day be an honoring more than a grieving, to experience what it’s like to not feel jealous of those who get alive-and-breathing fathers, to actually listen to Dad’s words and finally be present.

You loved ironing. It was the only way you got the TV all to yourself.

-five aloha shirts (your dad’s. Lucky he wore polyester pants.)

-eight plaid skirts (four blue, your sister’s, four red, yours)

-four pairs of Dockers (your brother’s)

-twelve short-sleeve shirts with collars (Fridays were “free dress”)

-four blouses, four sets of slacks, and one muumuu (your mom’s)

You took pride in your sweaty work, hanging each piece on a wire hanger and filing them on the bar that connected the living room to the kitchen. You’d crease every pleat and sleeve with spray-on starch, weave the iron in and out of each ruffle and gather.  You were the youngest and ironing made you feel purposeful, needed; like you mattered.

Afterward, you walked the long mile to Windward City Shopping Center, your pocket burning with the $5 bill you’d earned. Ambling across deserted Kane’ohe El—a minefield full of stabbing grass and velvety patches of green—you shooed off your black rubber slippers, touched your toes to the crab grass, and watched the purple leaves magnetize to the stem. Then came the sidewalk. You stopped often to pick wildflowers your brother called weeds. You admired the prickly bougainvillea—the brilliant oranges and pinks—with a deep breath, as if you could smell the colors. Gathering stephanotis, plumeria, and hibiscus, you’d bring your wilted bunches home.

Your steps were bittersweet. Scanning the road, looking for someone to give you a ride, you were always disappointed when you got to Longs on your own two feet. The lady there knew you. She’d watch you go to the candy section with a metal basket, toss in a Snickers, a Three Musketeers, a box of grape & cherry Nerds, a Butterfinger, two packs of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, a Chico-stick and a Violet Crumble—set the basket down at your feet as you perused the teen mags. You fingered Seventeen but ended up buying YoungMiss, depending on it to tell you how to pluck your eyebrows and kiss, even though you wouldn’t need to know those things for two more years. You’d talk about it with your friends, who’d tell you that you should shave your legs, but your hapa invisible leg fur would never be Okinawan or fully haole.

At the register, you handed over your money. The woman in her green button-up tunic with the white embroidery took out her hands out from her two front pockets and sighed at you, making her work. She got over it, though, and told you to have a nice day—flashed her automatic smile and slid the small paper bag across the counter with enough force to bounce it back toward her. She held the change out until you stopped fumbling with your beaded coin purse and held out your hand.

You passed Windward Twins on the way to McDonald’s to get a hot fudge sundae with extra nuts and small order of fries.  Dirty Dancing was playing and you wished again you were old enough to have a life, to have friends, to party like it’s 1999.  Your sister, with her permed hair, cut on a bias, and extra-large neon green Polo shirt over black leggings—her clique, Emiko, Keiko, and Reiko—who called to talk about boys and dances, who rolled their eyes at you and called you Raina’s baby sister—they saw it, and can’t stop talking about Patrick Swayze. You didn’t get it ‘cuz he wasn’t even good looking.

Walking past the movie poster, you remembered that time when you were seven and your brother took you to Alice in Wonderland. How he paid for you and bought you popcorn with the money he earned from his paper route. You remembered how he left early with you because you couldn’t stop crying. The talking flowers scared you and you said you’d walk home alone, but he insisted and left with you, calming you down, telling you it was a stupid movie anyway.

You walked the same path in reverse that day, except you played chase across Kane’ohe El field and laughed when he tackled you to the ground.  These days, he doesn’t talk to you at all. As if the small bumps on your chest and the bleeding weren’t bad enough—a schizophrenic alien lives inside you, rules your life, makes your words always come out wrong.  You blame yourself, but he really just hates you. He doesn’t even know why.

Usually, you take your last two dollars to Gem and buy stickers, but you’re getting too old for stickers. Besides, you have hundreds of them in a binder at home.  One day, you’ll throw away that binder. The sparkled rainbows and bright flowers, the puffy stars and cats will lose their adhesive, curl in upon themselves, and rustle like rubbish confetti down Dump Road.t They’ll cross the reeds and empty into Hamakua Marsh, graffiti-ing the lily pads of the protesting toads.

But that won’t happen today. On your way home, the rain starts. Before it comes, you smell it. You search the sky, see it coming straight back from the Ko‘olaus. At first, it’s just a little sprinkle. By the time it hits, you’re standing in the Kea-Watanabe’s lime green carport waiting for it to pass. The rain, in huge drops, makes a heavy mist, sprays the whole side of your body when the wind gusts sideways. You stand there hoping they don’t come home because if they do, they’ll think you have a crush on Kimo or that you still sell Girl Scout cookies.

You’re wet anyway, so why not just get really soaked, like you did when you were a kid? You remember the way the rain would trickle down your tube socks and puddle in your shoes. How you’d give up then, jumping into the gutter, kicking splashes high up and stomping gleeful holes in the stream. Fuck it, you think, feeling naughty, and start out just as the rain dies.

As you’re walking, you open the small paper bag and start with your favorite. The Chico-stick crumbles a little and breaks with your bite. A third of it falls to the ground, destined to disintegrate in the small puddle of rain. You walk over Namoku Bridge and take a right on Nakuluai Street.

You wonder about Amy Suzuki and the last time she was at your house.  Kidney stones were to blame. You were playing Barbie’s Fashion Show in your room and she wanted to use the runway towel but it wasn’t her turn yet. Then, your dad collapsed onto the floor and fainted. Amy was standing there, across the hall with you, watching you scream for your mom to come, help, Dad’s fallen, and you don’t know why. Amy’s mom came to pick her up that day. She never called you again.

Now, you’re passing her house and there she is, wearing rolled-up gym shorts and her brother’s college sweat shirt with the sleeves pushed up. It’s eighty-five degrees and she’s standing in her driveway, telling you about the drama program at Castle and how she loves Ron Bright.  You’re smiling and nodding—too shame to ask why she stopped being your friend.

As you pass Mokulele Drive, you wish you had been braver.  You trudge up the steep incline to your white and blue house, past the Nishikawa’s and Gonzalez’s. Past the place where your bike pedal fell off when you pushed down too hard and made a four inch white gash in your leg—white, of course, until the blood started flowing—down your ankle, to your heel—as you tried not to make gruesome footprints on the pavement. Past the empty front yard where your mother usually sat, weeding the garden in her puce polyester shorts, the mondo grass itching her ‘okole. Past the three Manila palms that were planted the year after you were born and now stand taller than you.  The garage is empty. Your brother is at football practice. Your sister is at a track meet.  There’s a note about a TV dinner in the freezer and how you’ll have to feed yourself again. You walk to your room and up-end your paper bag, eat everything in quick succession, and fall into a deep, sweating sleep.

The decades that passed offered many lessons in the art of self-trust, in seeing that maybe it wasn’t all about me, in finding compassion for the patterns he expressed with his behavior—in seeing how he was showing up because of the negative love he learned. Then one day, an epiphany arose—what if he was teaching me exactly what I needed to learn?

My exploration continues to deepen. I understand now that there was nothing wrong with opening myself to this person. I’ve found grace for the younger me, and an easing of my self-recrimination for that ‘stupid’ mistake.

Recently, I have done small things every day to reinforce the promises I make to myself, and I’ve watched my body transform and my heart soften, as I practice presence with the continually unfolding now.

Sitting with my fear of getting hurt and tending to the garden of my own self love has simultaneously opened up a space inside me where I feel encouraged to step into my creativity. For many years I’ve struggled with balancing work while remaining dedicated to my own equanimity. Adulting requires seriousness, focus, and hard work—while play, imagination, and expression easily fall by the wayside. And while I’m far from perfect, I’ve sought out and sowed the seeds that are growing into living my life better-aligned with my values.

How can we prioritize the things we truly find important like spending time with family, exploring the world, choosing a tribe that lifts us up, being in nature, and giving ourselves the time and attention we require to feel grounded and centered?

Mary Oliver asked, “Tell me what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

It all goes by so fast. And yet, we get stuck. We forget that we only have this moment, which is already gone.

Shar’s sister T had said it was unlikely Shar would get better, that her docs could find no cure for this disease that erupted in sores inside her trachea and lungs, in her mouth making it tough to keep anything down, if she was even able to ingest it in the first place. On Friday I got a text from T saying Shar would be taken off life support and that, if we wanted to say goodbye, we should visit the hospital Saturday before 10:00 a.m. It was a shock.

I began wondering about the arbitrariness of life, about who gets more time, who does not, and for what reason. Is it karma and the need (or lack thereof) to complete unfinished business? Shar was only sixty, an age I’d once thought of as ancient, but is now less than a decade away on my own journey. I thought of my dad, who died at sixty-five. His road also ended far too soon.

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He never got the chance to soften, to give to his kids what he managed with his grandchildren—an excitement to teach them rather than a frustration with our stupidity, an easy physical affection instead of the awkward sideways hug. He’d been saving his money for retirement, when he’d travel the world with my mom and enjoy himself, but he never got the chance. Was it stolen from him or part of some master plan?

We are never promised tomorrow, but losing my dad feels as unfair as losing Shar. She left three boys and three grandkids, along with a husband who is devastated and tired, having served as her caretaker for the past year during her decline. I wonder about how she is faring, where she is in the ether, if she ‘went toward the light,’ if she’s at peace. I hear her voice in my head reprimanding me in her distinct and joshing tone to be better, love better, forgive—to truly live.

There is a photo somewhere of her holding me on her hip when I was a baby. She is bare-footed in the short grass, a long shiny ribbon of black hair floating down her back, almost reaches her hamstrings. A few decades after the photo, Shar was diagnosed with alopecia. She mourned the loss of her lustrous hair and donned a short light brown wig that covered her ears. Around that time, a psychic saw a woman showing me her long, black hair. I thought it couldn’t be her because Shar was alive at the time, but there was no one else in my life matching that description. What was she trying to show me? When exactly was her destiny written? When was mine? Why are our lives linked and how do our journeys relate?

I think I have the answer, but it’s hard to face. It goes back to our fathers who were brothers, how they came to Hawai`i from Fiji and had no choice but to survive, boot-strapping themselves into prosperity and acclimating towards stability, then finding affluence.

It’s about learning to work too hard and losing the thread of what life is really about, fearing retirement and not mattering to the professional world I’ve worked so hard to build. It’s about letting my nervous system settle and exploring without an itinerary, putting aside my problem-solving and get-shit-done skills (that have been my focus for so long) and developing my curiosity and creativity, my ability to sit still, to just be.

We are each of us born into the world as pure souls, then socialized to contribute to the machine. We are rewarded for our successes through money and accolades. But once we’ve reached the top of our respective climb and slowed down enough to reassess, is there any there, there?

When I think of hell, it’s always been limbo—an in-between-ing where nothing is sure. And that’s the lesson—how to straddle the middle without losing myself, stay true to my desires and values, and matter to the tribe I get to choose. And maybe the work part is more nuanced. Maybe it’s about discernment over the either/or dichotomy of retired or not. Maybe it’s about making time for the writing and helping the people who need me. Along my way, I’m beginning to transform my compulsive search for external validation into belonging to the most important person in my life and the one I have to live with until I die—me.

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When my mother was pregnant with me, her doctor told her to have an abortion.

“You already have two healthy kids and a husband,” he said.

I don’t think he added, “You don’t want to orphan your four- and six-year old, or widow your mate.” But he didn’t have to.

My New Zealand-born mother was a staunch Catholic. When I was girl, she sat at my bedside, held my hands together, and prayed for me. She told me to close my eyes, then recited a blessing before tucking me in, “snug as a bug in a rug.” As a teenager, I’d find her sitting in her lime green armchair next to the front door, the floral lampshade shining like a halo as she waited for me to come home. “I’m just praying for you,” she’d say, before pulling the metal chain and putting herself to bed. She stayed married for longer than she should have, then spent twenty years working as a pastoral administrator, attending mass every day, sometimes twice. Her best friend was a priest.

Although she knew she could die from having me, she did not believe in abortion for herself. She told me I was her “lucky mistake,” as if the “lucky” part cancelled out the “mistake.” She told me she’d felt Christ within her when she was pregnant, that this was why she named me Christina. When I was older, she told me she had no regrets, and I felt blessed to have her as my savior, my champion.

While attending my Catholic high school in Honolulu, we debated abortion and, having seen photos of fetuses and all of the arguments Right-to-Lifers made about murder, I believed it was wrong. I was resolutely on their side, never thinking about the other—never having been confronted with that terrible choice. I was unaware that the photos were from later-term abortions of manipulated fetuses, still unviable on their own, specifically meant to insight horror in my teenage mind.

Instead, I consciously spent all my sexual energy trying not to become a teen mom because I’d watched a friend go through it, ‘disappearing’ at sixteen for months to give birth, even though everyone knew and everyone judged her—not the father, whose identity went mostly unknown. This made the message absolutely clear: pregnancy was the fault of the woman, and I did not want to be that woman, ever. In the girl’s bathroom, just before she left, she’d told me, “my parents promised to make it better later, but this is not my choice.” The look in her eyes was wild and sad, like a caged animal about to be put down for taking up too much space.

Back then, I saw how my mother’s religion saved me, even though as an adult, given the same predicament, I would have chosen the birds in hand over some righteous ideal. In fact, I have made that choice.

When I was engaged to marry my husband, who already had two kids from a previous marriage, I became pregnant for the first and only time. We had no financial hardship, no extenuating circumstance to give us an excuse the outside world might deem acceptable, and no religion precluding us from bringing a child of our own into the world. I’d left Catholicism in my early twenties after learning the gospels in the Bible were chosen three hundred years after the death of Jesus by a bunch of men who edited out all the female writers. But I still felt shame for not wanting a child of my own, for agreeing with my husband that the stress of a third kid ten years younger than the first would put those existing kids and our relationship at risk.

When I was honest with myself, I knew I did not not want an ‘opihi stuck to me for the first years of its life, feeding off my body and requiring my full attention. I did not want to be left at home while the two kids who already existed, bright with laughter or brimming with tears, grew up. I did not want my focus diverted into yet another new thing for them. They were already having a tough time with changes they never chose: their house suddenly emptied of their mom’s stuff, how they now had two households and two sets of rules, plus a new step-something struggling to find her parenting place and doing a poor-to-middling job most of the time. Blending a family was one step too far, and I did not feel confident I could accomplish the feat with any degree of success.

I’d never wanted to become a bio mom, not really. During childhood I’d intuited that my father’s blind anger had infused into me, and I did not want my blood translating into another, passed down epigenetically—this fear, omni-present. I’d spent my entire life, it seemed, trying to heal my injuries, both physical and psychological, and they remained with me: the terror of Dad’s leather belt, his pointer finger jabbing my chest, how he could silence me with a sigh, shame me with a look, how cruel his words could be. I learned as an adult that my father’s father had killed a man. I knew there was no way to escape the physiology of that act inside my atoms. I did not want anyone else to live through pain with me as the cause, did not trust the monster I knew lived inside me.

Even my mother agreed that no one should be forced to go to full term, to become a mother against her will—whose body is never the same, whose ligaments turn to jelly, whose pelvic floor sometimes fails, whose vulva is stitched or stomach is sliced, whose breasts can ruin into fire hoses. Abortion was not for her, but she was not going to say it could not be for anyone. Because she, more than anyone, knew the burden of what comes after—a lifetime commitment of knowing her child was in the world and the worry that never left, no matter how big her kids grew. No one should have to give a reason for why becoming a mother, just because she’s pregnant, is simply a ‘no.’

Just before we married, I went to my gynecologist, who confirmed I was indeed pregnant. She called me into her office where she sat beaming behind her big walnut desk, afternoon sunlight piercing through Venetian blinds.

“Congratulations!” She said, stack of pamphlets at the ready, fanned out in her hands like a vast treasure. “We’ve got lots to discuss.”

“Actually,” I said, “I don’t want to keep it. I want an abortion.”

“Oh,” she said, raising her eyes and furrowing her brow, the flyers disintegrating into a sloppy pile.

“So…” I stammered, looking down at my hands. “What’s next?”

“I don’t do abortions,” she said, suddenly sitting board-straight.

I looked up at her inquisitively.

“You’ll have to go to Planned Parenthood.” She scribbled a number on a pad, ripped it off and handed it to me with disgust, then shooed me out of her office.

At the clinic, there were stackable chairs lined up against the wall and a glass window behind which the receptionist sat. I filled out the forms, sat next to my fiancé, who held my hand. Silent, scared tears ran down my face, blurring the linoleum floors. It was pretty early, I thought. I regretted not getting the Morning After pill, but reasoned the procedure couldn’t be too bad.

I took some pills and spent two days cramped in a dark room I needed, my face wet with tears that wouldn’t stop coming. I felt emptied out, pitted. This will stay with me probably forever.

Mine was a tough decision, and though I mourn the baby I could have had—wonder what s/he would have looked like, talked like, what ideas and what personality—at least I got to choose it. My friend in high school did not. Her parents forced her to give birth, then give the child up for adoption. I saw her a while back in a retail store sitting on a stool behind the counter. The place was tiny, almost claustrophobic, though the merchandise was cute with summer dresses and bikinis, stickers and mugs painted with rainbows, “Sunshine” and “Aloha” scrawled in black letters below. We exchanged pleasantries but did not mention her child, did not discuss whether she had any contact with him/her, nor delve into the details of being a mom to a child she did not raise. There was an air of sadness about her, a sense of something missing she would never get back.

“How long have you worked here?” I asked, eyeing a pair of golden earrings.

“I own this place,” she said, grinning.

“Wow, really?”

“Yup, my parents fronted me the money, and now this”—she turned her hand up to the sky motioning to the merchandise—“is all mine.”

It made me think about the deal they’d made, the promise to make it better because she’d done her part, and now her life was marked by a choice that was not hers.

“I’ve got two kids of my own now,” she said struggling for brightness.

“That’s great,” I said. “Good for you.”

“And I hardly ever think of—you know.”

Her regret was palpable, along with the shame I knew was something she likely did not openly share. Was this store compensation for what she’d been through? Was it enough to balance all she’d have to go through for the rest of her life?

“Yeah,” I said. “I can’t imagine what it’s like.”

“It’s fine,” she said, waving her hand as if to swat away the past. “Whatever,” though her eyes welled up with tears.

She tried to focus the conversation back on me, how I’d faired since graduation, but the thought of her being forced unsettled me. What if I’d never gotten the choice? What if I’d been required to go through with my pregnancy and given birth to a child I did not want? What if I’d been the one to ‘rebrand’ that mistake into a miracle, meant to infer happiness while never erasing the actual fact that it was not what I really wanted? Worse, what if I’d had to live the rest of my life with someone wondering about me, finding out perhaps in some twisted mishap, that I could have cared for them but did not? Love is complicated, yes, but it too, is a decision.

And most women who are forced to have babies are not as lucky as me or my friend, are single mothers whose financial prospects dim exponentially, making the question of abortion not so much a moral one, but one that puts women’s health, wellbeing, and their ability to prosper at risk. Some women are stuck with impregnation and all that follows, unable to boot-strap themselves out of lives straddled with something men can simply walk away from.

About a year later, I walked past my friend’s store and the windows that once displayed mugs and gold-plated shell earrings had been replaced with a floor-to-ceiling photo of someone surfing, the crystal blue ocean glimmering: a promise of a perfect day. I knew I’d probably never see her again, which made me think of my mom, who passed in 2017. I am in awe of her—how she left everything and everyone she knew to come to this country and make a life for herself, how she believed in things like right and wrong, good and bad. When I die, I know I’ll see her again, even though Catholicism says I’ll spend eternity in purgatory, go to hell, or some such thing. I know this is bullshit because god is not a bunch of hypocritical white men making rules about women’s bodies while passing laws allowing concealed weapons and limiting health care for actual, existing humans who’ve already been born.

The god I know is in the earth and the trees, is inside of me, is connected to my highest expression of self—is in my fingers strumming the guitar, in my hands as I write. The god I know is in my two kids, the sound of their laughter, infused in the salt of their tears, in the ether of their dreams, in how much I ache for them to be happy and free to find themselves in this terrible, terrible time in our nation’s history.

1996: Nakuluai Street, Kāneʻohe

There is something sad about an empty house—the way a corner longs for the typewriter on the small desk, or a shelf for the books I read when I was a child—Momotaro The Peach Boy, for example, or The Crane Maiden.

The boxes are neatly packed:

a blue bird with speckled white dots on its back

a photo of my grandfather

a photo of my grandmother

a saucepan

The windows that framed two paper trees where my family once stood when I was just born: I in my mother’s arms, my father’s arm around her, the fascination in my sister’s eyes, and dimples on my brother’s fat cheeks.

My father planted red chilis and Chinese parsley next to the forgotten orchids that bloomed regardless.

An emptied house knows of crayoned walls, of white-washing and paint.

It remembers green tiles with yellow flecks, and what came next: first orange shag, then white carpet.

It recalls the sliding door that led to the patio, and how its bones grew into my sister’s room and a place for shoes.

On that landing I learned to tie my own.

Taking one up and one down, not having to use the bunny ears short-cut that was so much easier.

A few feet away, the carport became our own private rink.

On metal skates, we went in circles until one rainy day my brother crashed but didn’t cry until the blood came gushing.

I tried not to panic when my parents took him (again) to the Emergency Room for stitches.

When my parents sold the house on Nakuluai Street, it wasn’t because they were getting a divorce.

It was because they wanted to appear still married, because they couldn't admit failure.

My mother didn't want to sit in the back of the church without communion.

My father wanted the right to force her hand into his at business dinners.

They separated, and my mother went to a house in Mānoa.

My father went to a boarding house in Kalihi.

I was living in California, enrolled in graduate school.

There is something sad about an empty house, like a body at a funeral--like the ghost of Thanksgivings past, like seeing yourself sitting on the white carpet because there aren’t enough chairs.

Like someone else packing your things, then finding them in boxes marked with your name as the only descriptor, like a letter you forget to open until years later.

a pinned letterman jacket

a white lace dress

a teddy bear

My sister is the oldest. She was there with the boxes and packing tape, Sharpie in hand, stowing that blue bird and those photos, the ancient saucepan.

She helped my mother and my father empty our house of things.

Later, she was at the hospital when my father was dying, making sure he had all the right tests—even the excruciating bone marrow one, like tapping a maple tree for sap.

She knew the jargon and, after six years of my father's cancer, she had the best working knowledge of prostate oncology.

2004: Cooke Street, Kaka`ako

When we moved my father's things from the office we shared, I kept

a black and white notebook with our names in it

a Robert Frost quote in calligraphy about a road less-travelled

a letter from him to my mother. He was in Korea and drew an airplane, three children, and a daddy on the back of an envelope.

Mostly, though, a gaping dumpster swallowed his life’s work—file cabinets choked with manila folders, bins of blueprints, his ancient desk.

2015: Atherton Road, Mānoa

I resented wasting my Saturday, wished my mother wasn’t afraid of strange men touching her blue bird, her saucepan, the photos of her blue-eyed parents. I’d moved three times in the previous five years and never called anyone for help.

I wished my mother could have stayed in the house she loved.

I wished the stroke never happened, that the diabetes didn’t make her body unreliable and weak, that her bones weren’t shrinking, that I wasn’t taller.

She said, “if wishes were dreams, beggars would ride."

My mother lived there alone for twenty years. We bubble-wrapped the China from China she hated and never used, fondue pots I hadn’t seen in decades, spoons I slurped soup from as a child. Her sheets were soft and smelled like soap, her books, like mold.

My brother fixed a ceiling fan. My sister directed me to empty a display case: quarter-sized plates with their stands, the blue bird with white specks, the photos of my grandparents.

Then I packed the saucepan. It startled me that she still owned this artifact, that she’d spent over forty years using the same saucepan that wouldn’t sit straight on the stove, that rattled as it boiled.

There was something sad about an empty house, the way its creaks amplified, how the furniture once hid a section of wallpaper, the old way everything else looked in contrast, how we didn’t see the chipped edges of the counter until the counter was all we see, or the way the carpet was scarred where the bed once stood.

2017, Kāhala Nui

I couldn’t stand to be there, watching my mother’s life reduced to things. I lingered next to the front door. My sister called me to rifle through jewelry, clothes, shoes, and furniture. My phone rang, and the caller i.d. read Kahala Nui. Startled, I expected to hear her voice again, to say “Mom” again, even though I will never say that word again and mean my mom.

Stunned, I asked, “Are you calling from Kahala Nui?” The woman’s voice was not hers.

She wanted to get off my mailing list, asked as an afterthought, “How did you know?”

“My mother just died and I am here cleaning out her apartment.”

Grief made me mute. I was choking on no words.

She scurried off the phone, was sorry for my loss. I did not learn her name.

“I cannot stand to be here,” I finally said aloud.

And my brother nodded. My sister shut her eyes.

I left with one cardboard box.

In it:

the Hawaiian quilt from her bed that still smelled like her

her handmade Christmas ornaments

a cameo broach I bought her

I abandoned everything else, did not ask about the blue bird or the photos of my grandparents.

I left the saucepan behind.

Weeks later someone else moved in, used those same kitchen cabinets, lived within those same walls.

Does the space remember her ficus tree and anthuriums, the way she’d lay on her couch watching the coconut leaves flutter?

Or how my soul is squeezed with missing, now she is gone?

My husband loves me by baking not-chocolate-chip cookies, and I’m afraid to tell him this may be our last batch. We met fifteen years ago, when the recipe contained all the normal ingredients. I watch him drag the heavy stand mixer from the pantry floor to the counter, and open a package of the strangest part: ginger, of all things.

Sitting at the kitchen table, I google the stuff. I read that ginger production requires methyl bromine, an odorless gas that causes kidney disease, brain and nervous system damage, and vision problems. The EPA has named it a toxin that depletes the ozone layer.

We grow ginger in our garden. Beneath the soil, the rhizomes enlarge into fat, gnarled fingers, called hands. The plant sprouts from that chunky root sends shoots through the soil, where stalks hold longish leaves that flutter like flagpoles in the breeze. Like human babies, they take an average of nine months to harvest.

And even though the worst our ginger has gone through is an indirect spray of neem oil, I watch my husband chop crystalized rinds prepackaged from who-knows-where. The citrine cubes glisten and make my mouth water.

Before we met, I hated the stuff. When we started dating, I often got sea sick on our nautical adventures to watch the sunrise or surf. His boat was always stocked with ginger wafers, ginger beer and ginger candies. That’s when I first learned how ginger calms the stomach. It also contains anti-oxidants and anti-microbial properties, and it’s thought to prevent cardiovascular and coronary heart disease.

Back then, we fell in love so hard and fast. He was like home to me, like remembering who I was before adulting erased my ease of having fun without booze. He reminded me how to play. He taught me to surf, and we hiked and talked, went on adventures to new places, and met many new friends, even though we were so busy with full-time jobs and his two kids.

These years later, I’m still hard at work, and my nervous system still sometimes reacts like a tiger is chasing me. I have to remember my breath and tell myself I’m not about to die, that it’s just a stressful moment. But he’s so much calmer now he’s retired. Sometimes I don’t recognize him without the fancy clothes and important calls, sans the responsibility of so many people and projects. Without work, he gets to pick, and he plays a lot. He’s free in a way that feels scary because I don’t think I’d be able to fill time the way he does—also, I’m afraid I won’t have self worth without my job.

I prop my chin on the heel of my hand and watch him measure out gluten-free Better Batter. I can’t stomach real flour—I mean I can, but then my pooch bloats out to the size of a six-month-pregnant woman. Also, dairy makes me flatulent, so he adds coconut milk. Chocolate gives him migraines, so in go the carob chips. He measures a teaspoon of baking soda and pinches some salt. He’s experimented with pepitas, chia seeds, hemp hearts, and cranberries, but none had the same synergy as ginger, adding depth with its sharp sweetness, its zesty heat.

He chills the result in the refrigerator before pre-heating the oven. They bake for eleven to thirteen minutes. When they’re done, I take a warm one between my thumb and pointer finger and bring it to bite. The slightly crisp outer shell gives way to the soft innards as I chew. Ginger spice hits my tongue, and moistens my palate—a characteristic most gluten-free baked goods lack, rather resembling a dry sponge. The nubs of ginger dissolve in a sweet, mouth-watering release. I swallow, knowing I’ll miss this version.

We’ve changed a lot since we met, traversed many phases of life—raising kids then launching them into the world, upside-downing our lives for real estate investments, living in two houses to chase the surf, and one trip around the world. We’ve lost my mom and his grandmother, gone through multiple health scares and removed a brain tumor, spent nights in bed crying so hard we couldn’t breathe, and others laughing so hard we wept. But I worry about what’s next—what will happen when he gets bored of pickleball and guitar lessons? What if we never fall in step to the same pace again? What if we drift toward divorce?

Then I remember that for every difficult moment, we’ve both braved vulnerability. We’ve shared our most shameful secrets, our deepest wounds and failures. On the brink of heartbreak, we’ve shouldered what seemed unfathomably heavy and had faith in our ‘we.’ Each time, we’ve chosen trust over ego, found the other, and made it around our despair.

I frown after downing a few cookies and consider eating my last. “Babe, we need to talk about ginger.” Then I break the news to him. 

“Duh,” he says with a pained grin. “I always check. This is certified organic.”

In the name of the mother, the sister, and the holy priestess, Amen.

This is the body I have been given, and these are its flaws:

The space between my big

toe and second toe that one boyfriend joked, “someone could park a car between,” that my husband equates to a future in foot porn, that keeps me upright and un-teetering, that can pinch skin, that is beautiful.

The way my thighs rub together except for those two years I only drank coffee and smoked cigarettes for breakfast, when I weighed 103 pounds and I could see my mons pubis without craning my neck, the feathered way they touch when I walk, how muscular I’ve become from squats and lunges, how strong they are now and my related, perky ass.

My belly that always has now and ever shall be, except for that same Starving Time. How I will never be a skinny girl, how I only just realized that now, after so many crunches and leg lifts. How I check every reflection from the side to make sure I don’t look pregnant, how the wrong clothing can accentuate my bulge, how careful I am and so ashamed. How I was in the habit of sucking it in until it disappeared briefly during the Starving Time, how it’s impossible to regain that staunch awareness once you know what it feels to be free.

Back fat and the way my body sags on both sides below the line of my bra, the strong way my lats are forming after so many push-ups and pull-ups. How, ever since I went for a consultation with that plastic surgeon and he used a blue sharpie on my body for the places he would fix, I have hated so much of my torso, I’ve fantasized about cutting it off. How I know this confession is a sin.

My décolleté and the wrinkled way it’s begun to age, how the lines there grow deeper each year, how golden it is in the sun, how freckled and shimmering it becomes, dipped in salt water. How beautiful it can be.

This is my body and these are its flaws:

My pinky fingers that hurt if the joints aren’t cracked every hour, my left hand and the shooting pain when I pick up my laptop, how unsexy the Velcro braces are that help, how I fear I’ll have carpel tunnel syndrome or rheumatoid arthritis, both of which my mother had. How she couldn’t feel her hands anymore and regularly burns herself, how I have her stomach and thighs, how her balance failed, how I stumble and lose my footing, too.

The way my hands are lined like my father’s, how I have his nose and his beauty spot on my right cheek. How he’s always with me that way, even though he art in heaven or somewhere like that. How I can remember him pointing at my face like pointing to home on a map. How I remember his joy when he said it.

The left hip that is tight, the knee with tendonitis, the inflexible shoulder, the imagined hole in my left lung. The aching feet and ringing ears.

How the place where my wings should grow always aches, the way the muscles pull at my neck and collarbones, like marionette strings about to snap, my related headaches, and the way lacrosse balls work wonders.

My one and only asset: tits, and how, even though that same plastic surgeon suggested a “lift” which would also require implants, I love my breasts regardless of their imperfect sag, for the lovely way they look in v-cut dresses and sweetheart necklines, the way a necklace shines a spotlight on them, how the left is larger than the right, how my quarter-sized nipples shrink when they’re hard and how perfect they are, and soft. How other women sometimes ask to poke and squeeze in search of silicone. How before the days of plastic tits, mine were obviously real, and although anyone can buy breasts now, mine are still my pride and my power. How I don’t have to flaunt them, how they always just are and always have been, Amen.

In this body, I spend this life. I sit at desks and tables, I do dead lifts and squats and surf. I stand in lines and wait for bank clerks and grocery clerks. I measure myself against every other woman I see: how short I am, how fat, how she has this or doesn’t have that. How destructive this is, how I have to decide each time to stop because she can’t know and I can’t know, forever.

In this body my soul, my ego, and my ability to transcend heartache live. My pain lives, and the warm way my skin absorbs bath water, how it feels to float. How the skinned knee burns the same way as too-cold winter.

My husband’s lips anoint my flawed thighs. His hands caress my hated belly, massage my feet and the space where my wings will grow. He speaks to me like a loving gardener, encourages me and loves me, whole.

In the name of babies if I want them.

In the name of being breathed without thinking.

In the name of loving, then hating, then loving it again.

Amen.

Last week my friend’s son jumped out of a twelve-story building and lived. No broken neck, no punctured heart or lungs. He is not a paraplegic, and he did not maim himself in any way that will be physically telling of this trauma in a year. He broke his leg. He got some stitches. He is alive, mostly unharmed, and it is wholly a miracle.

It’s been terrible for my friend, who goes to the hospital and stays all day, spends twelve hours next to her son’s bed—terrible and wonderful, I imagine, just like it was for me with my mom when she was in the same hospital for the six months before she died. I was always grateful for more time, but I knew she wouldn’t be with me for long, and that was the terrible part for me.

It’s somewhat reversed when I imagine the fear my friend must be feeling. How do you get angry with a son who’s tried to kill himself, when he’s there in front of you, breathing? You have another chance. He has another chance, and that’s wonderful. It’s also terrible that it happened, terrible that it can’t be undone, terrible for whatever happened to make him feel so hopeless, and terrible that trying to die was his solution.

It’s hard to talk about suicide, and I’m no therapist. But someone who was very much like a brother to me killed himself a while back, and a very good friend hung herself during the COVID lockdown. When my brother did it, I was very angry with him. I thought it was selfish of him, so small-minded. Didn’t he know it was only a moment? And couldn’t you get through just about anything for a moment? I was also upset with myself because I had not been there to help. I felt responsible. When my friend did it, I went through the same process. I should have called her more, checked in on her. I should have been a better friend.

Eventually I realized that their choices to harm themselves were not mine, that I couldn’t have saved them indefinitely, even if I’d been there on the day they decided. I couldn’t be there on all the days. Eventually, they had to choose they wanted to live.

But I am terrified for the day my friend’s son is discharged and that afterwards, because sometimes, people who have failed and failed at killing themselves, eventually succeed.

Last week, the entire time she was relaying her story about her son, my friend didn’t cry—except for the moment she admitted she was having trouble believing that god was present in her life. She wondered whether god was good or real. Because isn’t that what we do when we are faced with our mortality—we look outside of ourselves and ask for a higher power to save us?

What if didn’t do that? What if before we were born, we agreed that there were lessons we needed to learn? What if our spirit selves signed contracts for our human experiences designating what we wanted to understand better? What if we hand-picked our own brothers, mothers, and daughters because we knew our hearts would break open in the exact and specific way we needed to evolve our understanding of the only thing that really actually matters in this life and beyond—which is love?

When I told her this, my friend said she didn’t know I did not believe in god. But I do! I do not believe that god is some white guy in robes with a son who died on a cross with a Holy Ghost trinity because that story has been taken over by power-hungry people who convoluted it into something else. What I know about god is not something I learned in a church (though trust me, I spent most of my childhood in a Catholic one)—it’s something I learned by sitting quietly and listening, a presence I felt the moment my mom died, when I felt the rush of her pure love fill the room.

I do not believe god is separate from us. I believe there is a god in all of us that is connected to the universal creator, that we are a conduit for love’s energy. I believe that god and love are interchangeable. I believe we are guided by spirits because I have felt the spirits of those who have passed, have witnessed the power of their protection.

And yet, I still don’t have the ‘right’ thing to say to my friend. I don’t have a magic spell to transport us to the time before this happened or to heal her son so he knows what life is for. My contract is not his contract. All I can do is hold space for my friend and listen. All I can do is ask her how she’s feeling and bring dinner to the hospital while she waits and waits, and hopes.

https://www.gq.com/story/hoffman-process-institute-retreat

Reading it, I thought about the tech bro angle, stats and data—how maybe that’s what appealed to me over a strictly transformational perspective. 

I actually heard about Hoffman through my husband’s friend and his wife, and not through the marketing of it. I’m not sure there WAS marketing aside from the website back then, but seeing the difference it made in people I’d known peripherally for decades—how they beamed with a fresh aliveness and confidence in facing life’s unknowns—that’s what made me sign up right away; that’s what made me call and ask to be put on whatever wait list was available, so I could get there STAT! and see what could be done for me. 

I remember asking my teacher on the very first day, after going through the homework and identifying over 200 patterns, ‘where is the good in me?’ It seemed so overwhelming, and I was in major awareness hell. The answer was so simple, so clear. It came in a moment that shifted my visceral understanding of what it meant to pick myself up off the floor and love myself, like literally. 

Hoffman is not a cult, not a secret society or elites-only club—though some days I wish it was. I’d love more community, more interaction off-line, more picnics-in-the-park and church-y vibes. I was raised Roman Catholic, and when I left that space in my early 20’s, I lost that instant connection to people just because we all believed the same thing. People who’ve gone to Hoffman aren’t from the same denomination, nor are they always ‘preaching the good news.’ The Hoffman ideal of Be-Do-Have means Being comes first—a non-aggressive act.

Being means sitting in this moment and noticing the small voice beneath the silence that says, ‘you are enough,’ over all my patterned self talk that screams otherwise. Going to Hoffman changed my life for the better, helped me see who I want to become, helped me trust myself again—not through huge acts of bravery—but through the every day inching of small decisions like ‘I will drink enough water; get enough sleep; learn which vitamins I should be taking and then take them,’ etc…

Loving myself is THE big, brave act, compiled by these micro-decisions, these small statements that I matter to myself more than what other people think of me or say about me, more than the fear that keeps me stuck people-pleasing and making do, begging for love crumbs from people who’ve shown me they don’t have the capacity to love me the way I need.

So here I am, Substack, writing it down—keeping that promise to myself to inch toward my creativity and believing that writing means writing means that I am, in fact, a writer.

*pics by 808studioeros

Then I see the door through which I learned to accept less, how I was programmed to believe that wasting my energy in trying to repeatedly forgive others diverted love I could have been giving to myself.

I will no longer dim my light to accommodate, appease, pretend, or undervalue myself.

Blessed be,

C

We come to Crater Lake, a caldera in Oregon, to learn about astro photography—or more exactly, my husband has come to learn and I have tagged along. The gate is un-guarded when we arrive after six, but it’s summer and there’s a heat wave happening. The blazing sun won’t set until eight-thirty. Conifers line the road, and on one side: charred stumps. Baby trees grow just past the asphalt, the fire having unleashed their natural propagation. There is a field marked with snowmobile signs, and later down the road, sticks ten feet tall mark turns and cliffs, so drivers can navigate unimaginably high snow. We get lost in the fifteen miles between the gate and the lodge, then get lucky when a ranger offers directions.

We stop to regard the lake, and its absolute sapphire seems unreal. We stare at it a long time, studying the ridges and snow-packed valleys, the tall firs that look like matchsticks, the section where the land slid away that is bare and smooth—before turning back toward the road and starting toward the car park. Patches of ice fill a dip in the earth despite the heat, and my Hawai`i-born husband must touch the old snow, walk atop it, and take selfies of us making shaka signs wearing our sunglasses.

We are nostalgic for other National Parks we’ve visited. We reminisce about the time at Volcanoes when we stocked up on strawberry mochi from Two Ladies Kitchen and played Trivial Pursuit past midnight when I finally won a game. We laugh remembering Haleakalā, how I sheltered behind a rock, the cold so bitter and unexpected while he took pictures of the sunset at golden hour and blue hour, the lights of old Lahaina still twinkling below. There’s a twinkle in his eye when we recall Joshua Tree, where he shot me in lingerie while I tried to look soft posing next to cacti. We talk about collecting memories instead of things, taking photos along the way for proof because if there isn’t a picture, it didn’t happen.

The next day we venture down Cleetwood Trail to the water, where he wants to photograph me in my bikini. It takes long minutes to acclimate to the cold biting my toes, but I finally dive, fingertips-first, into a deep clear space without boulders. Glacial water pierces my skin, distorting it with goose bumps. I stand and pose facing the far end of the lake, closing my eyes against a bright sky. I try to look skinny and svelte, sucking in my stomach and tensing my butt while relaxing my face and shoulders, elongating my torso and my camera-facing leg. I balance on a foot-cramping, uneven rock and forget about my hands, then remember to release the fists, where all the cold in my body is being expressed. I let go, my clenched fingertips uncurling to touch the water, too. For minutes I am numb, even after I’ve changed from my suit to dry clothes, and I shiver in the harsh, crisp air.

We arrive back at the lodge, wander the lobby, and find a mini-museum where I learn calderas used to be a volcanos, how this one imploded 7,770 years ago. I imagine the 2,200 foot tall cloud of land and dust, rock and branch, the aftermath of utter destruction that formed a six mile hole across and twenty miles around. There, in the negative space where the volcano used to be, snowfall has gathered and formed the deepest lake in our nation (1,932 feet!), only three percent of which has been explored, and who knows what lies below?

We wonder aloud about the way eruptions change landscapes, how we’ve both changed in our years together. When our son graduated from high school, we sold the house we owned for a decade. Now we live part time in a condo in town and a house in the country, chasing the surf. Recently, my husband was a full-time employee at the top of a corporate pyramid, flying to Los Angeles and San Diego, San Francisco and Phoenix two and three times a month, and these tag-along trips were different. Now he is retired.

When he told me he was retiring, I had a tough time, even though he’s been saying for years he wanted to stop working when he was fifty-five. For his next chapter, he’s said he wants to own his own business, but he mostly takes pictures of dolphins and waves, of surfers and rainbows, of me and of others, of the sky at night.

In the meantime, I’ve been living with the what ifs, and my anxiety has been building. I’ve feared we’d have to pare way back on our spending, unable to afford the life we’ve made. I’ve worried all his attention would redirect toward me and the promises I fail to keep—to write and work out, to take better care of myself. I’ve been concerned that without work of his own, he’d become hyper-critical of my business and spend his time fixating on my flaws. Ultimately, I was anxious he’d find himself and leave me.

All these horribles could still happen, but we wouldn’t have come to Crater Lake if he wasn’t retired. Now, he plays pickleball every Tuesday and goes on hikes. He lives in Vuori sweatpants and Patagonia shirts, sleeps eight hours instead of six. He is happier, more relaxed, and in better shape. He’s more patient, well-rounded, and able to take this astrophotography class, which gives him so much joy.

But I hope there’s something there, just beneath the surface—a tension to grow and become, a desire yet unnamed, a goal yet un-targeted. And while I can’t say what will come, nor how we will navigate whatever he chooses, we’ve built up and thrown out versions of our lives so many times, up-ending ourselves out of our comfort zones and leaning into our own evolutions, both individually and as a couple. Each time, we’ve come out of these murky chrysalis moments stronger, happier, and more satisfied. Whatever happens, this moment will pass and we’ll both change and grow—perhaps together, perhaps apart. If it’s the later, I hope we will find our way back to the things that brought and kept us together all these years.

At night I pile up the pillows and sit in bed writing and reading while he ventures outside to stare at the sky, not saying much to his classmates as they photograph the Milky Way making star trails, learning about what makes a great photo and what to edit away.

My father-in-law’s hospital gown

bares his left shoulder

exposes the wires

taped across an olive chest that hasn’t seen the sun in years.

His beard is over-grown

his purplish lips

still smile recognizing me—

a daughter not his daughter.

I tell him,

‘There’s nothing to do but wait,’

hope the crinkle between his brows melts

And the woman a few beds over stops wailing, “Help me.”

I imagine him young, astride a motorcycle

un-helmeted hair (long enough to cover his ears and nape),

side-burns, and mustache flapping as he sails down the Pali Highway

like connecting the notes on a sheet of music.

He is high

and howls,

closing his eyes for a moment

taking his hands off the bars just to see.

I reminisce for him

about the time he went to jail

for defending a friend for being drunk and young,

try to recall whether he punched his father in the face, or if it was the other way around.

He’s been sober since I’ve known him.

We went to Kaa`awa for his 80th

and hundreds of people came

to eat squid luau and poi and kalua pig

to shake my husband’s hand and say, ‘Your father saved my life.’

Now, in this wheeled bed

he closes his eyes

tunes out the beeping ER machines

and falls asleep.

I didn’t go about introducing myself the way I’ve noticed many do, the way I should have done in my first post—but here goes, even if I’m a couple of weeks late.

I love poetry, fiction, memoir—actually all kinds of writing. I believe in energy and spiritual awakening, and I’m trying to heal my own trauma. I feel most alive surfing, hiking, and moving my body. Heavyweight the podcast, The Great British Baking Show, and Queer Eye all make me extremely happy while also making me cry.

I live in Honolulu Hawaii, and I am the child of immigrants—my father was born and raised in Fiji and my mom was born and raised in New Zealand. They came looking for a place to raise mixed race kids, and also because my father loved Elvis in Blue Hawaii. They were also children of immigrants—my Chinese father and my Pakeha mother, both racially incongruous to the native people of their lands. This political moment feels personal to me, and my beliefs about the where I belong as a dual citizen of both the United States and New Zealand keep shifting.

I’m married to an incredible guy with two kids, now both in their twenties, and both officially ‘launched.’ I absolutely love my family, even though they can drive me crazy and push my buttons. Being a step mom is a subject I have a lot to say about because I’ve been struggling for fifteen years to find out where I fit in. On the whole, I have been 100% enriched by my experience, but it’s been tough.

I lost my dad when I was thirty and my mom when I was forty-three. At my mother’s funeral, a much older man who’d recently lost his father came up to me and said, “Now we are both orphans.” I hadn’t thought of it that way until that moment, and since then, I can’t seem to get it out of my head. I’ve been working on a memoir about the transition from what @Terry Real calls a reactive child into my wise adult as I re-parent myself, using tools I learned at the @Hoffman Process to re-orient myself from how I identified with my parents to earn love as a child—the standard operating system which no longer serves me.

I travel a lot—I just got back from an incredibly moving and impactful week in Baja with @Chip Conley @Elizabeth Gilbert and @Tererai Trent at the Modern Elder Academy. Their generous spirits helped me believe in myself again—enough to come on Substack and share my writing—something I would not have done otherwise.

I hope you’ll reach out and tell me more about yourself. I’d love to learn more about you in the comments.

Christina