Home

Six years,
and now the tide is taking them back.

The shore does not know yet.
I do.

I am not leaving in anger.

I am leaving because love does not pay rent.
Because beauty does not lower the cost of breathing.
Because an island can hold your heart
and still make it impossible to stay alive.

These islands never asked me to explain myself.
They simply let me be.

For once,
I was not the face outside the room.

I belonged before I spoke.
Before my voice gave anyone a reason
to place me somewhere else.

It is a strange grief.

To lose the one place
where being unseen
felt like being known.

They speak of being caught
between a rock and a hard place.

Here,
the rock is Hawaiʻi.

The place I love.

The place where I can look into the ocean
and still find light.

The hard place is leaving it.

The harder truth is simple.

I cannot survive here.
Not alone.

The cost is too great.

I am already carrying too much.

There is a safety net
waiting on the East Coast.

Family.
Blood kin.

People who knew my name
before I learned how to hide inside it.

A world that asks a little less
in exchange for tomorrow.

But a net only promises
the fall will not kill you.

It promises nothing
about where you belong.

My companion has chosen another path.

So I leave alone.

There are some sentences
the body understands
before the mind can bear them.

This is one of them.

The pain walks beside me.

Body.
Mind.
Spirit.

At some point,
suffering stops asking permission.

It moves in.
It learns the rooms.

It begins to answer
when someone calls your name.

Perhaps I have always been a nomad.

Not across countries.
But inside myself.

Every place becomes another room
I cannot keep.

Every goodbye,
another stone
carried in empty hands.

Different roads.
Different skies.

The same wound.
The same question.

Home.

Not walls.
Not an address.
Not the place others expect you to return to.

Home is where weary bones
remember how to rest.

Where lungs forget
they were ever holding their breath.

Where silence
no longer feels empty.

I found pieces of it.

Belonging here.

Peace there.

Hope somewhere
I could not afford to remain.

Only enough light
to keep walking.

Never enough
to stop.

Hawaiʻi taught me
its hardest lesson gently.

A place can save you
and still be unable
to keep you.

I love these islands.

I love the ʻāina
that held me
when I no longer knew
how to hold myself.

I wanted to give something back.

To care for the ʻāina.
To leave it gentler
than I found it.

Instead,
I leave carrying more
than I was ever able to return.

That sorrow has its own kapu.

Too sacred for excuses.
Too heavy for words.

Love does not change the numbers.

Loneliness does not lower the rent.

Survival keeps its own account.

Belonging should never
have to bargain with survival.

But mine did.

And survival won.

The kai will keep finding the shore
long after I am gone.

Perhaps that is what the tide knows.

Distance is not the same
as absence.

If these islands remember me,
I hope they remember
that I loved them well.

That I wanted
to leave more than footprints.

That I wanted
to leave something of myself
in the ʻāina
that gave so much of itself to me.

My fear is not
that I will forget the way back.

I could never.

My fear
is that life
will keep asking.

One more year.
One more sacrifice.
One more tomorrow.

Until returning becomes
the story I tell myself
instead of the life I live.

Until the ocean
is still waiting,
and I no longer
have the means
to cross it.

Until then,
I will keep walking.

Not away.
Not toward.

Only forward.

Perhaps home
was never the shore.

Perhaps
it was always the tide.

Always arriving.
Always leaving.

Always touching
what it cannot keep.

Or maybe…

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Originally published in The Hub Publication on July 23, 2026.