After the Honeymoon

I’m beginning to feel settled into my new home in the jungles of Puna, Hawaii, though not without an unsettling welcome from the island’s grand dame, the goddess Pele. Just this last week, we experienced torrential downpours for four days straight. Nothing stayed dry during the monsoon, and I reluctantly sent a few choice items (read: leather jacket) back to the mainland with my brother Skip, who had helped me move out here. Pele and her unpredictability have a way of whittling down your needs to the basic necessities. I learned this time back to bring only items that, while dear to me, could be sacrificed to the weather—hot and muggy or wet and mildewed—if needs be.

It’s a very different experience to be here with the intention of making this place ‘home’ for the next few years, rather than just passing through on holiday. Before, when I was here for a visit in August, I felt free and open. Now, I feel scared and unsure of who to trust. I’m daunted by how little I know of people and how little they know of me. When Skip departed for Salt Lake City a few days ago, I felt my stomach sink. See, I have a confession to make. I’ve never actually traveled somewhere completely new on my own. I always seem to attract a flock of friends or a comrade or two. This time, it’s only me. What makes the situation even more interesting are the events of the last year and a half. I don’t wear the scars of intensive chemotherapy very visibly, but I ache and yearn sometimes for others to grasp what I have gone through. It is the quiet isolation that comes with this experience: the knowledge that ultimately very few people truly know what you’re going through. It feels as though I spent a year marooned on a distant planet and suddenly I’ve plummeted back to earth, an earth that continued rotating just as always without my presence. I struggle to articulate my experience. On more than one occasion, I’ve sat with people I’m beginning to become acquainted with and flashed back in my mind to moments throughout my treatment: pancreatitis, the painfully long hospital stays, vomiting neon yellow goop into the toilet over and over and over and over again. These moments, painful as they may be to recall, have secured my identity for a while, and oddly enough, I find myself missing the cruel comfort of my chemo routine. I’ve moved somewhere where no one knows anything about my past. My surroundings feel as new as I do.

It is not what I had imagined it would be. I met and fell in love with this place. I spent months building up the fantasy of it all in my head, only to find upon returning that I have no idea what this place is, nor does it have any idea who I am. Our identities are unknown to one another, an exciting but terrifying realization. Truthfully, the only way to change that is to simply get to know one another, the island and me, apart from the fantasy. I wait patiently at the precipice of understanding, waiting to dive in and begin to piece together my new environment and a new identity for myself, to adapt and allow myself to be changed and affected by all of this, in hopes that someday soon I will be able to look around and call Puna ‘home.’