This is Hard

I want you to know something.  I want you to know something, and I want to be the one to say it to you and probably to myself.  I want to say something.

This, friends, is hard.  This instagram life, ripe with mangoes and the tan lines I have spent so many years chasing, with its crash-wave soundtrack and sea foam lightness and the grip a green coastline has on your eyes, this is hard.

Except for a single handsome gentleman, gray in the hair and occasionally long in the face at the discovery that perfection is not made with handles for holding, even when framed in palm trees and scented like plumeria, I am a literal ocean away from every person I have ever loved.  I am a literal ocean away from every person I have even just barely liked.  After living in a beautiful spiderweb of acquaintances and friends and family and even those who defy labels, I am spending my days sanding away the city shine so I do not stand out as a stranger in a web that is not my own.   I was granted a fresh start in a beautiful place, which is a thing I did not ask for.  It's a thing I have asked for before, and so I know its colors and I know its curves.  I know how to navigate wishes granted, but I find myself in a world of left turns now, unable to distinguish the edges from the center.

So this is hard.

I line the walls with happy using seawater paste.  I am grateful for the wide-eyed geckos who keep me company in moments that I wait for him, my only human, to get home from a job more difficult than either of us was prepared for because when you sell paradise to people who wait their entire lives for it, there are no second chances and there is no room for mistakes.  I worship birdsong in the mornings, an altar familiar to me.  I touch leaves and smell petals and work to love this place as a place that will certainly end up becoming part of me, a task easier for most than it has been for me so far.  I inhale ginger lily wind and thank the island for reminding me of the things in life I hold sacred.

But I am alone in this.
   
Apartment lights twinkle like stars on the hillside, but they do not know me and I am not yet welcome.

So this is hard.

I am learning two new people.  I am learning him, and the way he leaves his shoes in front of the door and the way he loads the dishwasher and the way he breathes in and then out when he sees open arms after a difficult day.  I am learning myself.  The way I resent giving up my yellow couch for two black ones and the way I miss the selfishness of a life lived alone, and the way I need him to melt into when the sky falls down.

We are learning all of those things you think you already know about a person.  We are doing it without training wheels in a life we are careful to project as enviable in a place is that is supposed to be perfect.

So this is hard.

I am sitting on a beach now.  The waves are using their inside voices, and I am barely out of the reach of a palm frond shadow, playing its fingers to play with the breeze.  I took a picture of this, which I will not need to edit.  I will use my seawater paste and buff it to a shine with gentle white sand.  Tonight, I will make dinner with him.  A kind man.  Patient and sweet, with edges just rough enough to hold onto.  A man I am still desperately in love with, who leaves his shoes in front of the door.  I will wish that we could meet friends for a drink and be a little sad and watch a Hawaiian sunset to numb the pain.  I will feel ridiculous for being in any sort of pain at all.

I will live this mystery island until I understand it, and I will go to work selling paradise as if it is made of magic.

And it is magic.  But it's also real life.  And this is hard.