“You know what's funny?” my ex-husband asked the day we went to have our divorce papers notarized. “On the initial draft of our divorce papers, you got our wedding date wrong.”

I had. I'd put the date I'd been hit by a cab as our wedding date.

“I thought it was great,” he said, laughing, a little mocking. “You don't even remember our wedding date.”

I was hit by a cab once. Did I ever tell you that story?

It was a year ago. I'd been married for a year and I was restless. I kept waking up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding. I was dreaming again, but all the dreams became nightmares.

I decided to face the fear at its source: Hawaii. Tropical paradise to most, worthy of honeymoons and relaxation. To me the islands had been a harsh mistress, home of every miscalculation I'd ever made. Broken hearts and broken dreams—broken by my own hand.

As I packed my bags, I imagined myself a conquistador, ready to go back to this land I’d once discovered, a place that had subdued me, only now I was armed with my galleons and resolve, a modern version of Miguel López de Legazpi, only in stilettos, over-sized sunglasses and clunky jewelry—to take possession once and for all of that island that had once laid me to waste.

“Yes, yes, I know Legazpi was in Micronesia, not Hawaii—that was Cook,” I’d said to my friend Atherton on the phone. “But no one did it like the Spaniards. When Legazpi took possession of the archipelago, as a token of genuine possession, right, he took out his sword and cut three branches from a tree, pulled out clumps of grass, chucked some stones and had crosses carved into the trees. How quaint is this? Let’s do it! Let’s run around Oahu, cutting branches, pulling grass and throwing stones! Ha ha ha! Let’s exorcise all our ghosts and claim the place as ours!”

“That is fabulous,” Atherton, always game for anything, had responded.

“So, darling,” Atherton asked a couple of days later, taking a drag of his cigarette. “How does it feel to walk among the ghosts of your past?”

We were standing on the corner of Nu‘uanu and Pauahi. I really thought my soul would be filled with tragic melancholy, at least some nostalgia—something. Anything. But there was nothing. I’d walked the dingy Chinatown streets, seen the police station were I’d once been questioned after those phony arson charges, spotted Todd, the bouncer who’d worked at Indigo when I’d practically lived there—all these things. Yet I felt nothing.

Places, people and things are full of meaning—meaning we give them. But you can’t go back to places any more than you can go back to people you've left behind. Because it's never the same. People and places tend to change. Or they stay the same, but we are the ones who feel changed.

Even if somehow, by some magic, everything managed to stay the same, and even if by that magic we didn’t change, either, reality would still pale next to memory.

You really can't go home again.

Honolulu was home once. She and I had a turbulent, powerful relationship. I knew her every secret place. I wasn't afraid of her darkness. I loved her darkness best of all, I think. While everyone loved her charm, her made up Waikiki face, her sunshine smiles, I loved her dark manias and intense, wet obsessions. She fed me and destroyed me.

“Hawaii, whore of the Pacific,” I'd written once. “Everyone will live you, but no one will ever die you. You'll die alone, with only peacocks to mourn you.”

But Hawaii was different, too. Time has glamorized her darkness. Hipsters crawled in and out of her secret places like vermin. I didn't recognize her.

“Are you laying ghosts to rest?” Atherton asked, putting out his cigarette.

I turned around and looked at him, “Maybe there's no such thing as ghosts. I don't feel anything here.”

What is closure?

The notion of closure comes from Gestalt psychology, which holds that our minds always want to see the whole picture even when part of the information is missing. It's speculated that this ability to derive meaning from things that are not perceived in full is the remainder of a survival instinct that once allowed us to visually complete the shape of a predator in the wild without all the required visual data.

But is it a vestige of a once crucial survival instinct or has this ability merely evolved to help us overcome a new kind of danger, like the haunting memory of an old lover?

Once a relationship is dissolved, we are left with incomplete images. We may never see the full shape, but closure can allow us an understanding of the over-all image, thereby dispelling whatever notion we have of unfinished business and ambiguity.

I stopped on Bethel Street: “OMG, Atherton! They finished restoring Hawaii Theater!”

Hawaii Theater, built in 1922 in Neo-Classical style and later reworked with a dash of Art Deco was once the home of Vaudeville in the islands. The place had been undergoing a complete renovation during my Honolulu days. And here it was, restored to its former glory.

“Isn't it fabulous?” Atherton asked.

“MENOPAUSE!” The neon marquee screamed, advertising a musical by the name.

I wanted to get a picture, but the marquee moved too fast and I got distracted by the Dharma Initiative van parked across the street.

I'd hardly snapped a picture when I heard someone call my name.

I turned around and came face to face with Vaughn, a gorgeous intense affair I'd had on a totally different zip code. (Ours really is the mobile generation, isn't it?)

“I can't believe this!” Vaughn exclaimed, coming over to me. “I was just talking about you. I'm with some people who are part South American and Japanese, like you. Come meet them, come, come, I insist.”

“How many minutes ago did I say there are no ghosts here?” I asked Atherton, leaning in as Vaughn pulled me into DuVin.

“Give or take three,” Atherton responded without missing a beat. “This could only happen to you. Or me.”

Inside DuVin’s Cask Room, Vaughn was regaling everyone with fantastic stories about our relationship.

“And one time,” he joked, animated, “she chased me with a pair of scissors…”

His friends turned to look at me, in on the joke.

“What a minute,” I said, completely serious. “Was that you?”

They burst out laughing.

“In all fairness, Vaughn and I were very dramatic, everything was very intense, completely insane. Remember the time at that place, near Abyss, that horrible hole in the wall—what was it?”

“Angel Wings?”

“Eww, yes!” I laughed. “Remember that fight? I chased after you with a chair?”

“You tried to kill me with an ashtray!” he looked at his cousin. “She got kicked out and came screaming after me in the street, ‘VAUGHN, I LOVE YOU!’”

I could totally remember that. It would have been mortifying if it wasn't so, well, insane and funny.

“No, I’m kidding,” Vaughn said, looking at me. “She didn't actually say that.”

I had said that.

“How did you meet?” someone asked.

Amazingly, I remembered. We'd met at a bar. He'd told me he had a girlfriend and then we'd had sex on top of his car. It was all very irresponsible and high-voltage, the way flings are meant to be.

“Is that a picture of the green flash?” I'd asked him once, pointing to a picture on the wall of a charming beach-side bar we used to frequent.

“So it says,” he'd replied.

“You can't capture the green flash,” I'd said, indignant. “You can only experience it. Like this—like us.”

But our relationship wasn't a flash. We were hooked, we drew out the fling. Once you begin to get to know each other, passion can only go so far. Soon, you begin to need patience and understanding and commitment and neither Vaughn nor I had the vaguest understanding of what these things were or how to administer them. It's entirely possible we may have wanted to be able to do so at some point. But we couldn't. We had no idea how.

“If this is about surrender,” I'd asked him toward the end, “then whose war are we really fighting and what happens when we see the white flag rising? We'd choose death to occupation.”

It was true. Vaughn and I needed intensity because we were bored and empty.

“I'm a passion-killer,” he'd warned me once. But he wasn't. He was a passion-eater. So was I. Without the earth-quaking, bone-shattering insanity of passion and madness, we were nothing. Self-injurious, we were each other's razor blades, cutting up our perfect lives so we could feel something. Anything! Who gives a shit? Burn it all to the ground, make us feel alive!

Later on, when we were breaking up or trying to, I'd asked him if he'd ever seen the green flash and he'd shaken his head and railed at me, “is there even a flash?”

At some point, the escape becomes the prison. I'm fuzzy on the details, but I remember him telling me he didn't want a girlfriend and later freaking out because he thought I was sleeping with some random person. It was absurd, insane. We both became completely absurd and insane.

“It's complicated,” I said to Vaughn's friends.

“I met you at that fund-raising marathon your mother was having,” Vaughn said.

“What? I thought we met at a bar?”

“I'd seen you around.”

This is exactly what he said the night he met me at that bar. Of course, back then, he hadn't said anything about a charity event—though he had mentioned all kinds of other things, including reading my writing and seeing me get wild at a strip club.

“So you're still married,” Vaughn asked when he and Atherton stepped outside for a cigarette.

“And you're still not.” I answered.

“It's not for me,” he replied, lighting his cigarette.

I sat on a rock, next to the pond.

“Let me take a picture of you,” he said, taking my camera. “Anastasia, Anastasia. Crazy, crazy girl. I saw an article in a magazine recently that made me think of you. Do you read Details? You should pick up a copy of the April issue. There's an article in it about you that explains everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“The reason why I couldn't stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop seeing you. Because you're crazy.”

“I'm crazy?” I laughed. “You know, Vaughn, I’m really glad I bumped into you.”

“What are the odds, right?” he asked. “Wait, are you leaving?”

“Oh, I must keep moving,” I said. “Like the green flash.”

“On a scale from one to 10,” I asked Atherton, as we walked from the old home of Studio 1 on Nu‘uanu and North King, “how weird was it that we bumped into Vaughn in Honolulu of all places?”

“I know!”v

“Only in my life, right?” I exclaimed, pausing momentary on the crosswalk.

And then the cab ran me down.

I don't know who screamed. I don't think it was me, but I can't be sure. When the police were questioning me I told them I didn't know anything. I don't think I ever fully lost consciousness, but I registered very little after I was hit. I remember the flashing WALK signal, the scream. the black and white stripes as the crosswalk spun out under me, and then the voices around me like a chorus.

Atherton was there, he had me in his arms. I looked up at him and, in my best Natalie Portman said, “hello, stranger.”

I'm not a funny person, but if you can't laugh about something like this, then you're really screwed.

I lost a shoe and my camera felt like it'd been lodged below my sternum. I felt these things. My senses registered everything—the pain, the sound, my cold foot—but my mind held on to none of the data. It all passed through me like a river.

Moments. Life is made of moments. Life begins with a moment and life can end with a moment.

I knew a man once, Dan Hughes. He owned a restaurant in the Marianas called Coffee Care, a brilliant little place that provided a speck of dust in the middle of the Pacific with delicious coffee, fine dining, excellent wine, and intellectual discussion. Coffee Care was where I went on dates, where I went alone to decompress, where I went to write, where I celebrated birthdays, where I went to have business meetings—it was a wonderful place.

Dan Hughes used to always ask me to help him do the displays in the aquariums. I always said I would, but I never did. He did that—he tried to get people involved in the coffee shop. He showcased local artists, he hosted Scrabble matches long into the night and held fun tournaments out in the sun. He made the place.

After a successful run, Hughes sold the business and moved to Thailand to have the life he always wanted. It was in Thailand that he died, still young and seemingly full of many more wonderful moments, killed by a motorist while waiting on his bike at a stoplight.

Moments. We come and we go.

I was released that same night with minor injuries, save for the back sprain, which will always haunt me. But I'm grateful because we all know it could have been a lot worse.

I told my sister then I'd known it wasn't my time and I believed it. But I'm human. Humans are wrong all the time. What about the people who die suddenly, like Dan did? Do they even have time to think? What if I’d died that night on North King? What if I had died chasing ghosts?

If I learned anything about that night, it's that I want to go with both feet walking toward the future, not running back the past.

Perhaps it's fitting that I had that in mind when I was filling the divorce paperwork.

Closure, I realize now, isn't digging graves—it's about letting the past go, taking what's valuable, and learning to leave the rest behind.

And so we go, one step at a time.

PS: We miss you, Dan.

BLOGGIE TREATS:

Susan Mernit, fellow BlogHer contributing editor and a dear friend of mine has a wonderful piece about moving on: Breaking Up: When Do You Stop Loving Someone?

In Getting Closure After a Breakup Priya Ramsingh explores what closure is and how to get it.

Ex-Files: Should you cut sling load and drive on? by Affair of the Heart tackles what it means to let go in an ever more connected and plugged-in world.

Contributing editor AV Flox is a freelance writer living in California. She's wild-caught and carbon-based, specializing in the cheapening genius and beauty to the point of democracy. She writes a column twice a month on BlogHer and regularly posts about web culture on her blog OMG. OMG! OMFG!