I've gone sideways

When I haven't written in nearly a month, it may be that I went away, got busy with work, or went off the deep end and couldn't face the world for a while. Sometimes it's all three.

So I escaped for a 12-day vacation on Maui and the Big Island of Hawaii. My godparents had planned to whale-watch and visit the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and when they asked my mother and me to join them, I decided I could do with a break from work and home.

The trip leaped far beyond my expectations. Sure, the state of Hawaii is known mostly for its beach scene and ocean life. And yes, the ocean life is splendid. I enjoyed the whale-watching and I went snuba-diving (something between snorkelling and scuba-diving), which let me spy on sea turtles and sea urchins and throngs of marine fish whose names I can't even pronounce. But when we went to Hawaii, the largest of the islands but one which receives much less tourists, I found my haven. I'd biked down a volcano on Maui - a dormant one - but that didn't prepare me for the splendor of Kilauea in Hawaii, one of the most active volanoes on Earth. We hiked across one of its craters; at night, we went out to the coast to watch the lava flow and the huge plumes of smoke emerging from the ocean as the lava met the water; we watched the moon rise amid the stars, and there were so many of them I got dizzy from playing connect-the-stars. Because Hawaii is so isolated, everytime I stared at the shoreline and beyond, barely able to imagine how far the ocean goes out, I truly felt apart from the madness of the world. I felt a pleasureable shock every time I rounded a cliff face on a hiking trail and found before me an unmarred vista of ocean and green hills.

I used to occasionally experience the sensation of being in the middle of nowhere, or isolated in the American Midwest when I lived in Michigan. Wandering around the Big Island, I could see the ocean often and yet I also felt as if I were lost, very far from the real world, caught in a time warp. The land still looked young, even though the volcanic island I stood upon had taken millions of years to form. Whatever it was, I didn't want to leave. I'd found my mecca. Can a person have two of these? My other, my first, is Italy.

But every ticket of mine has had a return-trip stub and I came home to editorial projects that seemed to mock me for thinking that I could avoid them. They always win out. And when I received some ill-timed information that I didn't want to hear, it seemed as if much more than editorial projects were mocking me.

How to fix it? Thoughts about careers; DVDs; a Kinokuniya sale; finding a pewter figure of the monstrous yet magnificent armor that Filippo Negroli designed for the Duke of Urbino; talking to my godsister and remembering how innocent we were as children camping during school breaks and how tough it is to be adults but also realizing that her company is my life raft; chancing upon my copy of Sideways and taking a trip again. When I watched the movie nearly two years ago, I felt sad at the end, but now as I read the novel, I feel comforted by it. Miles, the self-destructing, hurting writer has words for me that I cling to as if my life depended on it. Thank goodness I've also got the DVD.

Posted by Monoceros at March 19, 2006 12:20 AM