Lines And Mirrors (Intermezzo)| Searching the Aloha

I’ve got about an hour until sunset, two hours until the dark comes. But I feel like… Like if something is supposed to happen in these two hours. No, even though I’m a bit tired, I cannot go back to Punalu’u and get ready for the night.

Instead of turning back, I continue along the road that has led me to the caves. The streets of Hilo feel strangely familiar, homely, even, even though I’ve never been here. I need to get some fuel before I can continue on the main road alongside the bay. There’s a football ground, some beautiful trees. The sky is bathing in orange and pink and the sun has just touched the horizon. There’s people walking and talking, there’s people being with each other and people just being. There’s people lonely and alone, and people alone but not lonely. Despite the traffic, the place feels oddly quiet.

I find parking as easily as if I’ve always parked in this place and leave my car without any worries of it being towed or me getting a ticked for parking where I’m not supposed to, which is a very rare situation – unless I’m parking in our driveway, I always stress about this.

Liliuokalani Gardens. I don’t know what I expected when coming here, what I was searching for. Maybe I didn’t expect or search for anything. But I’m here and somehow, I found it. Maybe, sometimes, we find what we need only after we stop frantically chasing after it.

The paths that are near the ocean are submerged in water. I can’t tell if it’s because of the high tide or because of the rain up in the hills. Maybe it’s both. The water is perfectly calm, not one single ripple disrupts the perfect surface of the mirror, the gate to another world.

I feel almost like if I was in a trance. My body isn’t my own, anymore. I’m disconnected, disconnected from my own thoughts, my own flesh, disconnected from the world I was born into.

Lines and mirrors. I crossed some invisible line and dove into a mirror while starting to walk through the cold water. I can feel shivers traveling down my spine but that’s somewhere far away, in a body which I’m bound to only by a thin thread that could be cut or ripped any time.

I don’t know what’s happening. And I don’t know if I want to know. I am somewhere and this somewhere isn’t somewhere in our world.