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“Breakups aren’t hard to do. They’re inevitable. The notion that love is unchanging and fixed is immature: if we want to “stay married” or together, forever, then treat one’s relationship like a surfer treats the waves: with unending enthusiasm and joy. Falling down and losing one’s breath is par for the course.” ~ Dr. Willard Evans

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They’d bought their way out of hot boredom and flown away.

It was all as if God had descended unto the fucking amazing earth and touched the glorious waters with big turtles swimming about and the oh so pretty! strange fruits and there were eight foot effing red flowers blossoming and He had smiled a shit-eating grin at His handiwork.

You know: Hawaii.

They spent their first days oohing and ahhing at the natural fireworks that is Maui: the tropical beauty, the strange huge fruit and trees and flowers all of it like something out of Alice in Wonderland, the 6-foot turtles and tourist-friendly dolphins competing with jerky surfers for the next wave, brah, the 80-foot waving bamboo, the twin waterfalls, the salt-wet local-as-a-motherfucker still-trying-to-breathe fish (he was vegan, but enjoyed everything else—namely happy bright round avocados right off the tree, the crazy Star Trekky spiked amophous fruits, the little bananas with big taste, the farmstand tacos with broken shells in the shape of aloha on the countertop).

His joybank went from empty—after 10 years of stress and being broke and yadayada—to half-full in a single rainbowy Maui lover’s day. Cuddling and kissing and hand-holding and…

…

he dove into her, slipping and sliding up into her waterpark.

And then they’d sleep in the retreat’s perfectly white soft poofy bed, sweating lovers’ sweat upon each other.

The morning brought coffee and continental breakfast—granola and fruit and milk or almond milk. They walked the grounds, picking fruit off the trees, exploring the tasteful luxury of their eco-minded historic hotel. She led him through sweatily earnest asana in the yoga room. They joined a Hawaiian buddy of his for visits to a nearby town (Paia) full of wonderful, whacky, sinister weirdos—like wholesome versions of Mad Max cast members.

The morning mist rained like lit-up crystals into the sunshine and the daily fucking double rainbows, all the way, shone from mountain to ocean below.

If a unicorn had walked up and mugged him, he would have shrugged. If a flower had up and served him Stumptown coffee, he would have tipped a buck.

“A rainbow a day,” he shook his head, half-blinded by the beauty being cannoned into his eyeballs.

Yoga Girl catsmiled, with those wide troublemaking dark sandalwood eyes he’d loved so well and begun to fear. She shook her waterfalling hair and laughed, her voice literally cracking with figurative joy. She did cartwheels in the courtyard, her long bright dress riding up and falling down as she turned over, her blackwhite bikini bottom flashing innocently beneath her long bright dress. I already said that.

She was deep as a human rainbow—bright, surprising, sudden, distant, ephemeral, magical, uncatchable, so shallow as to not exist in the first place…an instagram of a photo of something real. But lovely.

And he was taller and tanner and fitter every morning in their mirror, his old unused smile beginning to crack open and unrust like a born-again Tin Man. He learned to open coconuts without cutting himself, he kissed and was kissed, he breathed both in and out, consecutively.

For so long, nearly two years now, and for three years before that, and really six years before that…he’d been alone and worked and led a kind of monastically-focused entrepreneur’s life. His worky’s routine: brush teeth dogbike to cafe, work work dogbike home, work bike lunch bike work work work bike climb work climb work bike work work work work work work work work work, sleep work sleep sleep sleep. Repeat.

And as Food Mama had once told him, concerned, his energy for love was all going into his laptop, his closest relationship, his only steady. And his appetite for love had closed shut since The Ex.

But now he’d awoken, like dusty treasure from a time capsule, butterfly from the caterpillar, a new snake from old skin, a bear after winter…okay—out of cliché analogies—and found he was starving. All he wanted and needed was simple: intimacy. A few days of shelter from the storm that was his busy life. He needed the exquisite restful joy that is romance, just as a thirsty man needs water. And this first vay-kay adventure of his old young life promised respite.

He hadn’t ever been one for vacation: doing nothing is hard. Vacation seemed like an old-fashioned concept for yuppies, trustafarians, retirees—people who didn’t find inspiration in daily work and service.

He wasn’t rich, yet. “Tourism is something for the Mad Men generation,” he condescendingly observed, that first misty warm night when they’d landed in Maui’s 1960ish old school airport. The little airport reminded him of Connery’s Bond movies and his grandfather, Bernie.

His friend Cleanse Chef picked him up in his convertible and, top down, drove Eco Boy and Yoga Girl up to their hotel below the volcano.

“Back in the 60s…no, the 40s, Hawaii musta been a true paradise, man. Now the beaches have all mostly been stepped on by the big hotels—these same hotels diverted the sacred water supply from some of Maui’s famous old mountain waterfalls. The waterfalls are gone, now, they used to fall offa that mountain there. And now Maui’s land is all planted with GMO sugarcane and GMO pineapple—monocrops,1000s of acres, they get sprayed with 1000s of tons of poison, every month. Even worse, they’re watered by a web of PVC pipes that get burned along with the sugarcane, every harvest: you’ll see the black smoke rising up in pockets in the air every day on Maui. You know, 92% of Hawaii’s food is imported—and this is on one of the agriculturally-richest lands anywhere on our blue planet, pal. We’ve raped Hawaii, Eco Boy. We’ve left only enough beauty to bring in tourists.”

And what was left, that small sliver, was breathtaking.

~

Click here for part II (link coming).