After the Idyll

After a little while, Michigan left. Back on the mainland, his dog had disappeared. The dog had been his companion for years, he had to go find it.

Hmph.

* * *

I wasn’t heartbroken. It was sad that he left, but only that: sad. Not life-threatening. No reason to feel that my life was over.

I visited museums, babysat, swam, traversed the high cattle country, hiked as far as I dared across Halemaumau under Pele’s evil glare, sniffed at eucalyptus bark in the jungle, dared the trip wires to trip me, tumbled in the surf and walked out bleeding, gathered Pele’s hair.

Dead broke, I ate fruit that fell from the trees. Michigan had left a rack of bananas and a coffee can full of granola; they were alive with worms and ants. This gave me brief pause. When the cattle stepped on the water line, kinking it, I swiped the long grass with towels to mop up the water, then sucked the towels dry.

All the while I lugged my soul around like a dead weight. All that honeyed, luminous light, steaming and sparkling, the heaving ocean and sulfurous steam and rotting flowers’ perfume—every little thing broke my heart. I gazed at it all from a far shore, as a mother would at her child through the glass lid of a coffin.

It’s not that I wanted to die, I felt that I already had.

* * *

Soon I returned to the mainland, to a house on a hilltop with a goat and a big, scary stallion. In the valley below was a pig farm. Kudzu overgrew everything. The hillside was a jungle.

My roommate was a midwife. Sometimes I had to leave the house so clients could give birth in my bed. She took chickens in payment and killed them.

* * *

I called Barbara.

She was working one last season at the camp where we had met years before. Next spring she would graduate college and then we would … I don’t know what! We were already taking the world by storm.

Just a few months ago, this long, last free summer had stretched out before us, promising a tale of two idylls, our parallel paths running so close our souls could easily cross the breach to brush up against one another for a while. We loved doing that.

That was the idea, but it didn’t work out. Immediately I veered away and lost touch. The second I stepped off the plane and Michigan laid a homemade lei on my shoulders, there was nothing but the present moment for me.

This was not a big deal. Our friendship had endured separation before, Barbara in DC and Boston, I in upstate New York. We were like two intersecting waves in the sea; we went our ways, commingled.

A supersensible heart-bond is a divine gift. An hours-long, settled-in cozy, heart-to-heart talk is heaven on earth. Sometimes, even soul-twins just need to connect.