4. Inner Compass

There’s something utterly nerve-racking about getting to know the sea.

It is beauty in the most primal form: ultra blue water that teems with life, virgin white foam that has carried people for centuries to new continents, dreams, hopes, and way of life. Dawn dances rosily upon the crest of each wave and twilight stares longingly upon its own reflection in its depths. Its tides cannot be contained, its maelstrom temper never soothed. Lakes and streams can be damned, mountains drilled and gutted, soil tilled and pasteurized, but the sea… the sea is immobile. It has seen the beginning of time and so it shall see the end of it.

The first time I really saw the sea, I couldn’t breathe. Sure, I had seen it before: I’m a block away from it; I flew over it for six hours to get here. But there’s a difference of perception for the local, the tourist, and, like me, the in-betweener. To a tourist, the ocean is tranquil, quaint, a great background for a meal and a trip. It is missing from their lives and they revel in its freedom. For the local, it is a home, an identity, a physical barrier that stands alongside their ‘islanders only’ mentality. It represents the start and end of cultures: native Hawaiians came by boat and were destroyed by those who advanced the same way.

And the in-betweeners…well, we’re in-between.

My friend sent me a snippet of Esta Spalding’s “Lost August” and she nailed us in-betweeners right on the head.

“The sea is a wound
And in loving it
She learned to love
What goes missing”.

The in-betweeners came here to escape the trap of mainland life: they still have the appreciation of the tourist, But it also represents the start and end of a life: the endless endurance of the native. We embrace the exclusive identity of the island while bitterly missing the life beyond that beautiful ocean.

The sea is our hopeful wound, our gaping possibility. And like any in-betweeners that truly meets the sea for the first time, with my lower body in the water and my upper body mimicking the horizon, I cried.

But now I’m waxing poetic, and that is never good.

3. Duality

There’s something very tricky about college that most high school seniors don’t anticipate at those graduation parties and banquets. Sure, we knew that dorm food would probably be awful, that parties were going to be crazy, and that parents would emote on move-in day x10. Symbolically, we knew we’d get independence: the freedom to stay up and out all night without repercussion, the ability to skip class without permission, and to dress as scantily as we pleased. We would be able to conduct ourselves however we wanted, whenever we wanted, with whomever and whatever we wanted.

And so, graduation is a celebration of gain.

What we didn’t anticipate is loss. And for the college freshman, the collateral damage on a sense of self can be very high. The parties, the people, the freedom: its intoxicating and seductive in way that only absolute control of one's destiny can be. Unfortunately, the freedom to do anything also yields the freedom to be anything, and therein lies the problem.

Now, before I start sounding like an after school special, warning about how drinking underage can lose you your dream job, your future wife, your perfect parking spot, and claim to a happy life (please excuse my youthful condescension on how substance use is treated in the media), I want to make a point. These experiences are necessary. You have to see the extremes before you see the middle; you have go overboard in order to learn how to swim. Or else you drown in the ignorant, stagnant water that is an unchanged perspective.

I tend to air more with the camp who see change as a necessary factor for personal growth. However, it should be taken into account that I can't speak for every person my age. We're all different, so I guess I can only speak for myself.

But I do know that everyone has that one moment where your life is turned upside down. Where everything is awful and wrong and its all that you can do to keep your insides from bursting and melting all over your history homework. The moment where you stumble into the world you've been tip-toeing around for years; that ever-elusive "adult-ness" that involves mortgages, tax forms, and ultimately, the rest of your life. There is no guarantee to where you're heading: your very structured formative years have been overturned and you're faced with the vastness of destiny.

How could I know this? Easy… I asked.

When at coloring pictures at a friend's apartment, he mentioned he was feeling lost. He was so fed up with feeling that he went for a four hour walk through the streets of Honolulu and while he found nothing new, he still felt better. He couldn't explain much very well, but he had seen a group of people that were having coffee and arguing about whether Clinton or Obama was the better Democratic candidate. And he realized that he wasn't ready for that sort of responsibility; that he wasn't ready for any responsibility.

So his solution for this feeling?

Coloring.

And so I leave you with our night.