permission to wobble
On back-to-back romances, the long swim home, and choosing a new craft.
I am half-awake, my terracotta blankets stuck to the backs of my knees and inner thighs. I sweated all night after sleeplessly rocketing between sadness,
anxiety,
and a libido that felt more like a swollen mosquito bite than desire. I spent the night trying to quell all three, but to no avail.
I’ll have to wash my sheets.
The morning light is leaking through my blinds, and I realize:
it’s been two weeks since there was a “good morning!” in my Messages. Two weeks since anyone reached for me in that way, even digitally, within their first waking moments.
They started with the man from the farm,
the one who followed me across the rows of kalo and through the mud. The one with the daughter and the truck. The one with the gruff kisses, local-boy sensibility, soft-dad confessions, and all those Capricorn planets. The one who talked about family, told me I was an amazing mom, and made me wonder, “Maybe we could become home, together.”
But then together, we learn the truth. All he does is work. His dad is sick. He is giddy and can only see short and long-distance, but not here. He lives in a parenting world I can’t even begin to understand because I’ve only ever known single motherhood.
I didn’t even get to kiss him goodbye—just a string of voice notes from me announcing my departure and one of his own, sent from atop a piece of heavy machinery growling between his apologies.
I should hold my head high, place both feet on the ground, and move forward. I take the first step and realize my arms and heart are filled with his hope, his worry, and all the other shit I’d been carrying alone all along.
I waver, I wobble, and I send a Happy Father’s Day text. I hope he gets a sweet day with his daughter and his ill father. Like a fool, I mean every word of it.
It goes unacknowledged, and he continues to watch me on Instagram.
My love is true and so embarrassing. It’s time to move on.
It was only a few weeks, I say to myself, wiping my eyes, as I walk myself back to my life. It is a silent and lonely return home, but I remember how good I am at being alone. Now I get to focus on things like money and motherhood, and to “stand on business” as the internet loves to say. But instead of striding forward,
I teeter, and I stumble, and I fall
right into the next man.
One who calls himself a fighter, an artist, and a lover. He is from far away, a place I’d never dream of calling home. He doesn’t choose me because I am a mom, but he quietly respects and admires it from the perimeter. My deep heart, bruised from the first man, feels safe right now.
We meet at the foot of Punchbowl, the small and sacred crater overlooking the Makiki neighborhood, an urban jungle of concrete walkups and aging high-rises bordered by the freeway and the notorious Pi‘ikoi on-ramp.
I say, “Hi!” knowing I am on my period and safe from the ovulation haze. He buys my coffee and admits he is nervous. “Why? It’s just me,” I say, flashing my teeth and upper hand.
But then he surprises me. He lays out a blanket beneath a Pink Cassia tree, along with a bold and well-thought-out offer: let’s be lovers and friends. We can get what we both want. “I can get what I’ve been missing: intimacy. But not with just anyone,” he says. He is batting his eyelashes, tracing the fresh mark I tattooed over my heart chakra with his gaze. I face away from him and towards Punchbowl. He continues and promises he’d never demand anything of me.
“So what’s the catch?” I ask. “What do you need for this to work?”
His response: All I need is you.
He tells me I am lovely. I also think he is lovely. I think, “This, we, could be lovely.”
Yet, it’s not the love I really want. Need anything, I’m stopping at Foodland-love, snuggling in the wine bar-love, let’s take the kids to Dave and Buster’s-love, where should we go next winter-love, baby come here let me get the knot out of your shoulders-love.
But I can’t tell that to this man who is staring at me, asking me so sweetly if he can taste me and if I’ll help him run from whatever’s in HIS heart. It’s too heavy, too tender.
I want to stand up and say, “No thank you, I want something real,” that this feels like a ticking clock, a proxy, no matter how beautiful and tempting he may be. I want to leave and attempt to be lonely.
But my car is so far, blocks away. I can smell the heat rising from the concrete, and the tree branches are slowing to a stop as the Tantalus mountain breeze retreats.
His lips are parted, and I can feel him wishing, willing. I almost become, but he is too close to me, the knife tattooed on his neck beckoning my hopes and my lips. “Whatever it is, whisper it into here,” he seems to say, spreading his arms open towards me.
Off-kilter I go, taking a deep breath, and intending to say what I mean.
But instead I wobble and out comes,
“Okay.”
I want my, “good mornings” again. I want to be seen again. I created all this love, and now it wants a place to go, even if it is into something ephemeral, hungry, and just a dream of a dream.
Fuck it. Let’s go. He smiles and hands me a flower to seal everything.
So we dream of dreams in his room next to an avocado tree, beneath the high-rises, and next to the busiest on-ramp on-island. We are loud and voracious, knowing this is not for forever, so we should grab as much of each other as we can. I think of Kacey Musgraves’ Dry Spell and imagine she’d be proud of me. He plays House of Balloons, cooks us dinner, and gives me shirts to wear. We lay under the moon and listen to the waves.
It feels good. It feels nourishing. And as soon as we begin, everything begins to shake.
I told him to meet me under Le‘āhi at noon,
but I arrive at the beach hotel bar at 1030 so I can let myself wobble alone, in safety.
The bartender asks if I am from here and I say, “Yes.” Because it’s true—not through eternity or blood, but by ties, especially to Le‘āhi. He places a Bloody Mary, then an Aperol Spritz (and another) in front of me, all of which are resort-good, resort-strong, which is slightly weaker than I’d like.
“This isn’t my first time here,” I say aloud to no person in particular. “I’m quite good at heartbreak. I’ve practiced.”
We came together under the trees, so I thought we should part ways under the trees.
He forgets that I am more from-here than he is, recounting his stories at the nearby beach park, but I think of how that’s the place where I left my son’s father. How could anything be more catastrophic than that? I’m listening, but also thinking, “You are good at heartbreak. But I win. I am better at goodbyes than you.”
I don’t share this because love shouldn’t be a game and I’d rather kiss him goodbye one last time. We are in the middle of the park, the trees swaying around us, and he is tasting me gently, sadly, and dropping the last of his affections. One of which makes me wish he could hold all the love I still have to give. I won’t say it here.
“God, you look so good. Thank you, thank you, thank you for this. I will miss you,” he whispers into my ear. I wish it would never end and that none of this ever happened, all at once.
“I’m a pro. I didn’t ask to be good at shit like this, but I am,” I think. “You have no idea that I’m going to cry when you leave.”
And I do. He zooms away on his work-bike, and I dash to the water, shedding my clothes, and swimming further and further away until all I can hear is the surf sending spray toward the clouds. I sob and float and leak tears until the salt is everywhere.
The swim back is long and quiet. I didn’t realize how far I’d journeyed away,
but when my feet touch the sand, I find my way back to land. Crushed coral gives way
and my grip slips. I wobble to my car with two men to love and forget.
I make it into the driver’s seat and see Le‘āhi peeking from between the willows and the Monkeypods. The sky behind me is pristine, but ahead of me, I smell mountain mist from Mānoa.
I turn on Led Zeppelin and pull out of sight, onto the freeway. When I open the front door, I cuddle my child, set my sketchy L&L mix plate on the counter, and take a beer with me into the shower.
The next day I find his shirt and write one last goodbye—halfway for him, but mostly for me. An act of self-indulgence, a failure of restraint, and a reminder to myself that I show up fully, regardless of whether others do or do not. I fold it into his shirt and gift a small mesh Baggu as an inside joke. As I walk up to his doorstep, I suspect I am being embarrassing again.
Yet, I leave it on his doorstep in front of a frayed window screen. I pray I haven’t betrayed my little bag, that it is treated with love, and if not—I apologize sincerely for my
wobbling.
The little bag is okay. As I walk away, he asks: “What if you were great at something other than heartbreak? Other than writing beautiful goodbyes?”
I don’t answer. I text the man about his shirt, and he thanks me. I reach for something else to say
but I remember that I am carrying two heartbreaks and I stop.
“Permission granted,” I say to me instead, and I let it rest. I pull onto the freeway and drive away.
Permission to wobble, I whisper for the next couple of weeks when I reach for my phone in the morning.
Permission to wobble when I remember the surge of being seen, my prowess at heartbreak, and the cost of LOVING, even if only halfway and in between the big dream of
standing solid within myself and someone, something that is real.
~*.~*.~*.~
It is Sunday afternoon. I arise from a nap because the sun has swung his way west and in front of my window.
I sit up slowly into the cross-breeze of two fans and two open windows. My skin, damp and dewy, cools immediately. I am alone in my bed and reminded of how good I am at endings. I have become an artist with heartbreak, an expert at disappointment and goodbyes.
There is a small bird, chirping gently, in the palms just beyond the walls of my room. A kōlea appears on my lawn, too. I lean forward, and a curiosity stirs, interrupting my post-nap daze.
“Perhaps I could learn a new craft. I am too good at heartbreak. Maybe I could write a new world. One where I am met. Again and again and again.”
I close my eyes, and my feet land within this new idea. The balance of a baby, it’s all so new.
Permission to wobble. In fact, that’s the only way to begin at all.
