The very same year that Elizabeth Gilbert ate and prayed and loved her way through three countries, I high-tailed it to Maui to do the same. Gilbert’s journey from divorced and depressed to finding love, as anyone who has read Eat, Pray, Love knows, took about a year by way of spaghetti a la carbonara in Italy, yoga and meditation in India, and the temples and blossoms of Bali. By the time she left Bali, she'd found true love. My version of Eat, Pray, Love could be titled Eat and Drink While Loving the Wrong People, Pray Meditate Manifest, On Line Date, Confuse Love with a Slew of Other Issues, Crash and Rebuild Slowly. It has taken me eights years and counting. Allow me to backtrack.
New Year’s Eve, 2001, I lay in the porcelain tub of my Manhattan pre-war apartment. Candles were lit, Ella Fitzgerald was playing, and a glass of Sherry was within arm's reach. As my skin warmed and softened against the icy wind that blew outside, I knew that this was it; it was time to leave my marriage. I was young still, thirty-one. But I’d married much younger, before I’d grown into myself and out of this particular life. I did not know what I wanted exactly, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that there was more out there for me, more of life. My husband and I separated in the early weeks of January.
I did not know then that my mother would be dead in less than three months. I did not know then that my still-husband would drive to Rhode Island and play Amazing Grace on his trumpet at her memorial service. I did not know then that H and I would laugh at stupid things at the post-memorial reception in my mother's living room. We laughed at how many of H’s prom dates and ex-boyfriends were in attendance. At “friends” of our mother’s who cornered us in the supermarket aisles to offer condolences peppered with comments like, “So sudden. So sad that she died without having any grandchildren.” At how much Hawaiian Punch we’d bought for the reception even though we didn’t know anyone who liked it, and no one drank it.
That frigid, final eve of December, I did not know that eighteen months later I would have put everything in storage, found a rental on craigslist on the north shore of Maui, and flown to an island I knew little about to live on my own for six months.
The first time I came to Maui, it was to escape. This is where I began to heal, gasping at the clean, sweet air through the heavy exhaustion that enveloped me. I extended my ticket and stayed even longer. I, a northern European/ East Coast girl, slipped into a sweet existence of guava scented hikes, nights lit bright by the full moon, breezes scented by plumeria blossoms. I lived in the space of not being known, other than what I was willing to share. I danced at parties dressed in angel wings or beaded hats or whatever the theme of the night required. I drank too much and woke up hazy in the early morning hours, dipping myself in the cool ocean to wake up and refresh. I flitted. I flirted. I feigned nonchalance. I fell hard. I learned to surf baby waves, but was most content sitting in the ocean on my board looking back at the emerald green mountains. Instead of teaching, I picked protea on a small flower farm Upcountry for Auntie Ruth, a seventy-year-old Portuguese lady who'd be born in the house next door, the one with the red tin roof. Auntie Ruth swore a blue streak.
The first time I lived in Maui, I created a new life for myself far from home. It wasn't necessarily a life I recognized, but that was what I wanted. Ironically, I had moved from a city of 8 million people to a small island of 150,000 for the sake of anonymity.
Only later did I begin to connect the dots: my grandparents had lived on Oahu - one island over - in the early 1930's when my father was a toddler, my grandfather flying planes from Pearl Harbor. And my half- brother, my father’s son, had backpacked around much of the world after college, passing through this island. He’d camped on these very same beaches, sitting in the sand and playing guitar, watching the Kona storms blow in. I'd flown 10,000 miles to an island in the middle of the Pacific to get as far away from what I knew as I could manage, only to realize that part of me had belonged here all along.
In the past eight years, I've moved to Maui, moved back to New York, and then again to Maui. The second time I moved to Maui, I wasn't escaping. I was returning. Eight years, and I’m still eating, praying and loving. That's just the way my story has unfolded.
