A Tree - Wrinkles and Rings
The concept of tree rings has always enamored me. Each ring is physical proof of about a year of growth, and sometimes there are even scars to prove a difficult time. This line is the tree’s best possible telling of its own story. But not included in those rings are pictures of the roots and the water they dug into the earth to find. The rings don’t include the leaves that experienced the hope of Spring and the acceptance of Fall. The rings just can’t include a snapshot of the birds, the squirrels, and perhaps children who made memories or lived their entire lives on its branches. The Great Fire left a mark but it can’t capture the screams of a baby deer crying for its mother or the scurrying of bugs trying to get away from the heat. If a tree could talk I wonder what stories it would tell as its most prevalent memories, trimming them down to only the most important ones so as to not take too much of the listener’s time. Even still I wonder if the tree would simply point to its rings and say “I just…I have lived a good life.”
Turning now to someone’s face: a smile line showed up this year that wasn’t present last year. How many times must joy have entered that person’s chest, exploding into a smile so many times that it became permanent? I think forced smiles show up differently on someone’s face, too. A wrinkle may not equal a year, which makes me wonder what proof we have of the life we’ve lived.
Social media may have evolved into an idol of proof for me, but each photo almost feels like just a picture of a tiny wrinkle, or a tree ring in a branch. How can I express the heartache I was feeling while watching the sun rise over crashing waves, greeting the morning after not sleeping because she wasn’t next to me, and never would be again? The answer is that I can’t. I can only hope that you imagine in the same way that I can only imagine the squirrel and its babies leaping from branch to branch, taunting wild animals below, the same way that I can only imagine a sparrow’s birth from an egg and first trust fall of flight, all held in the cradling arms of one ring’s worth of tree.
I just lived in Hawaii for 6 months, and that experience felt like a tree ring or two for me. Call me vain but I don’t really think I have the wrinkle to prove it. Day to day I remember thinking, “I’ll write about this day soon. It was elaborate.”
Ring 1: Dude Friends
I never really smelled the salt in the air.
When I close my eyes, it’s 75 degrees and I can feel the saturated breeze on my face. It feels damp…not heavy though. There’s a lightness to the breeze that feels the same as the water looks: crisp, clear blue, damp. Not the moldy kind of damp. The damp that you feel when the rain falls on a hot day and you choose to shirk your responsibilities and jump in a puddle to make the biggest splash possible. It’s been years since I’ve done that. Ok, my eyes are still closed. I can hear the waves crashing loudly. My house was on a cliff so there was no option to turn down the volume on the “ocean waves” white noise. My house? Sorry. The house I was sleeping in, rather. The house belonged to dozens of people thanks to my former coworker who I was subleasing from, she had to leave in a rush. A week wouldn’t pass without someone knocking on the door looking for her, and a spiritual group met in the living room for a few hours every Tuesday – whether I was there or not. One such Tuesday I emerged from my room, groggy from a nap, to a woman in her 50s naked from the waist down, changing in the living room because both the bathroom and the spare room were occupied. It was Tuesday, I should’ve known. Whoops. My eyes are still closed, but I'm squinting now trying to get that image out of my head by thinking about the sun rising over the crashing waves, which I saw every morning.
The smell of salt never really made itself known to my nose in the 6 months I lived in Hawaii. To be fair, I never actually tried to smell for salt. It never crossed my mind. The house was in a neighborhood beyond any of my cell service and had no WiFi, so as my first act as tenant I bought a router and promptly named the WiFi network “Salty.” Even still, I never thought to actually take a sniff and notice the salt. Maybe it’s there, maybe it isn’t. I’ll have to check if I ever visit again.
I open my eyes and it’s 9 degrees outside. I’m where I’ve been yearning to be for the last 6 months. Back in the coffee shop where I’ve plodded at this keyboard dozens of times before, not sure if the pit in my stomach has reached a new peak of intensity or if I’ll look back on this time as a time when I wasn’t really all that anxious. I’ve just received a rejection email from a job I really wanted and was good at. God knows I haven’t planned my finances around rejection, when have I ever planned to fail? God knows I didn’t plan to not be dating who I moved to Hawaii with, when have I ever planned to fail? Maybe that’s something that should change a bit as I approach 30. I’m 27 now, I know, but 24 feels literally like a blink ago. I’m not really sure how much more of this “by the seat of my pants” living I can take. I’m in this State because I realized I had nobody to tell my stories to. The one fuel that has propelled me through my escapades, questionable choices, and adrenaline hunts has been a promise of some future gathering. One where I’ll have something to say at the table where my friends are, as we learn more about each other through the recounting of mundane work days, intense experiences, and matters of the heart. Having something to contribute has always been the goal, but having something to contribute to is something I have taken for granted. Never losing that again is now my goal.
11/24/2024 - Hilo, Hawai’i:
dude friends
I have some time to think, I’m alone in this town of 48,000 people. A few hours ago I went to jazz night. Alone. I sat, alone, closest to an aisle on some makeshift balcony seats on an L-shaped terrace of sorts. People across the way, together, dangled their legs over the dance floor below. These were the nicest, comfiest seats in this place, and there were only 15 or 16 of them all put together. The rest of the venue was creaky, perhaps because of the hundreds of people jammed into it. The walls are welcoming, held together by a love of music and the glue of community. People here have put in effort to be with each other. Real, genuine effort for community fueled by love and not loneliness. I'm sure the roof would have caved in years ago if this place was built on an escape from loneliness. I sat with the aisle on my right, one empty seat on my left, and improvised music in my ears, ringing out from below.
Isn’t it so easy to feel eyes when you’re alone? They feel sharp and they feel like they matter. When you’re with friends it doesn’t matter whose eyes are on you because only the eyes of your friends matter.
I want to be independent so badly, I really do. My neglected friendships are a testament to that. But I guess I’ll get to that later. Independence is so fun - not having roots, doing enough things to make life worth looking back on and smiling, not being stuck. But man the eyes felt sharp tonight. It would’ve been nice to bounce an idea off someone or ask if they need a beer.
The music hit my ears and took my mind off the eyes. The man across the aisle (he was 3 feet from me) was so invested in the trumpet player it felt like he knew him. After the trumpet solo finished up I leaned over, gulped down some anxiety and said to him “I don’t know much about the trumpet, but that looked so difficult. He’s such a good player!” After a double take the man hesitated, grunted in agreement, and retorted “I just love this song. How’s your night going.” After some small talk and suddenly becoming very interested in a friendship with the guy in front of him, his shoulders shifted away from me and stayed, uncomfortably, angled away.
Now that I’m on an island, I’m realizing that I took every single dude friendship I’ve ever had for granted. I think that’s all I have to say about that.
I just write about things I’m actively learning, in case you haven’t figured me out yet.
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