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“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
