It’s quiet enough to hear myself dream again
We’re sitting on yet another tiny bench beside the ocean
Benches play key characters in our story and with the precision of the timing since we landed in Hawaii, all we have to do is pull off on the side of the road to look at a nature-painted scene all spread out before us and there will, inevitably, be a bench. It might be balanced on driftwood or constructed from lumber, but a bench will be there and we’ll have the place to ourselves until we get up from that bench.
As we sit on a tiny bench beside the ocean and we are hearing/sensing the waves crashing against the black lava cliffs, he’s telling me about being on a Navy ship in the middle of the sea and how sometimes the water would be so calm that the surface was a sheet of glass, a mirror, reflecting the sky. He couldn’t see the horizon, it was like he was floating in the middle of nothing.
“It was incredible,” he said.
I keep asking him, “What if you knew last year that this is where you would be today?” And I’m asking for myself as much as I want to know his answer.
This trip to Hawaii isn’t the mirror that reflects me back to myself, but it is giving me time to sink back into my writer skin and remember the core of me, who I was before the world got in the way.
Sitting in a hotel room in Denver last year I texted Christopher who sat on a bench outside an airplane hangar in Greenville. He’d been my friend for as long as I could remember. One of those rock-steady friends, the kind where you can go three years without speaking but call if you’re in a ditch. He’d come help. No questions asked.
“There’s only one person who has ever intimidated me,” he wrote.
Damn, I thought — that person must be scary because his smart mouth wasn’t bothered by drill sergeants.
The way that question was answered is another story, but the short of it is that I went through a very long list of names until I realized the person he was referring to was me.
“Why am I intimidating?”
“Because I’ve loved you since the first day of homeroom in ninth grade.”
Holy Basil man and I argued after I drank his brew on the side of the road. The tiny cup held hold basil, lemon, ginger and — “ A secret,” the man said with joy condensed into the lines around his eyes. “It will make your vision brighter, the world clearer.”
“Will drinking this make me like the people in the world better?”
“You come to realize the only answer to anything is love. It’s what makes us. It’s what makes everything.”
“What’s the fourth ingredient, the secret, what is it?”
“It is a secret,” he said, and laughed.
As a young poet, I was taught certain topics were too base, too cliche, to attempt to tackle with words.
God.
Love.
We were told to leave those themes to mass market writing. They had no place in literature.
I argued with my professors. I only wanted to write about love.
Sometimes you can’t see the sea for the stillness and the thing that you need the most is right in front of you.
I could easily have ran away from Christopher’s offer that night when I was in Denver and he was on a bench in front of a hangar and we texted until 2 AM.
Saying yes to genuine love was the scariest and hardest thing I’ve ever done. To accept it fully I’ve had to crack open my well-built facades. My defenses were coconut-fortified, elaborate, exact. But now that I’m open to receiving, it’s quiet enough to hear myself think again.
“What if you knew last year that this is where you’d be today?” I asked him as we sat on a bench in Hawaii with gigantic waves crashing all around us.
“I did,” he said. “I knew where I was headed.”
I will continue sipping the offerings of mad saints until I can taste the fourth ingredient.