senior yeah, high school:
almost immediately after the last day of classes, i got on a plane and flew to lana'i, hawai'i, the island i grew up on.
rather, i've always said i "grew up" there, but that phrase has always struck me as problematic; for someone like me, in that i've lived in maybe too many places to say which ones have "grown me," and in that i wonder just what exactly "growing up" is (although the latter may be a testimony to my still having a lot of said growing up to do). i've gone through the years and the motions. i've fallen in love, fallen (questionably) out, moved away from loves ones, watch others die, etc. etc. - to me my years have amounted to a view of seemingly limitless confusion, consisting mainly of struggle and only tinged with the enlightened-peace that hollywood and middle-aged rockers sell as possible.
but for conversational purposes, i say i grew up there. at this point in my life i've spent more time on that seven-by-twelve mile island than i have anywhere else, with portland being a close second place.
dancing with fire on the beach - every photographer's fascinated with blurred night shots, and while i didn't think of it explicitly while i shot, what metaphor better capsulates youth in all its unbounded voracity i never tried to keep in touch with the islanders after we left - maybe a little, as a cute parental formality. leaving i didn't really understand what was going on. i still remember the first moment it really hit me that i was truly leaving
and i mean that in the fullest sense of the word. "to leave" is a verb i would clump with the often-used-but-rarely-comprehending-the-full-connotation vocabulary. i would include "to hope," "to regret," and the word "faith" among them.
the island, and that i might not have ever seen those faces again. that's heavy for me, and to this day the concept intrigues me. it amuses me often that people wax about life in this sense, saying "yeah but you'll meet others," "you can always go back," or other such half-sincere lukewarm encouragement. logically, it's never a given that you'll meet others. and really, you can never go back. on my better days i might see this as a blessing; on my normal ones it is perhaps one of the defining reasons for my neurosis.
with that said, i have always met others, in friendship, romance, mentorship, although not love.
i got a phone call from my old friends there one night. teenage voices that i would not have guessed. immediately after talking i felt a sense of calling. all my movement in the residential sense had been since then forward motion: i had not been back to visit any of the places in which i'd "grown up." i was curious as to this feeling - one i had surely sensed in others; a childhood, in this sense, is a sense of belonging that surpasses what you've made for yourself, thus it ties in to identity, and people who look back fondly or even neutrally i think have an attachment to that. you don't need to learn how to put yourself out there to have a childhood in this sense - it's given to you, it will make you, and you're too young to ask why question letting it be as such.
the beach that i visited daily - voted most beautiful in the world, apparently, for its golden sand serene isolation. i never thought of it as such as a kid, obviously - but upon visiting i realized that the backdrop of these years of mine was significantly different than that of my mainland peers.in this sense i'd always felt like i'd only caught a glimpse of such things, or that i had separate childhoods scattered throughout the united states. the idea of belonging, not only as mentioned above, but to the subculture of childhood-claiming was almost exhilarating.
so i booked a ticket. i spent a week on my old island, marveling. at the results of the pubescence of figures from my childhood, at the lifestyle which to me had grown a special type of exotic in that it was once so integrated into my heart but now foreign to my body. as a kid i could outswim adults and my skin as dark as the filipino natives. i spoke pigeon like any other local, despite my haole skin. now i spoke west coast slang - "dude," instead of "bra," which i intentionally unlearned in utah through the Mormon Church Center for Linguistic Education through Social Castration. My skin was (actually) white, i wore glasses, and hadn't really touched a true beach for a long time.
most people don't understand that, apart from being an official state, hawai'i might as well be another country. thus i was marked with its culture when i came to the mainland, and marked upon returning as a mainland city-kid. i almost felt guilty, in a way that's been best explained by authors i've read who write about leaving the ghetto to pursue a better life. that's not an understatement - hawai'i has some truly ghetto parts, especially for a white person. appropriately i was shaped by this, again in a way that relates to mainland white-person-in-black-ghetto discourse. i don't go into this with everyone because i'm aware of how controversial and trendy that whole shebang is.
it's not that the words "better life" were inscribed on our departure, but my education was the reason for us leaving. an old teacher, upon seeing me again, told me he'd always thought i would wind up in harvard. really i could go on and on about this, but the point is that: leaving. it was then i realized just how much of a trend it had been in my life. having never looked back before, seeing what exactly i had left was dumbfounding. really it's not that one leaves a place; they leave possibility, potentical, in search of the same, but of a different color. either because of this phenomenon repeated again and again, or simply my brain chemistry, or whatever - i'm today continually perplexed between these two seeds of possibility - to stay or to go. it seems trite but really, there are few greater impacting decisions in your life than where you decide to do such things. i pick up and go in one sense without thinking and and in another because i think too much.
i found connection there again, after all those years - which was amazing and surprising, as i lean towards nurture vs nature. but my mind jumps to the paragraph above - leaving. always leaving. i wonder these days if the amount of goodbyes has affected my development. the sense of developing community fulfills me greatly, and i've been able to do that so far wherever i've lived. i live for this connection, but i can say goodbye like a pro. i'm more emotional on the car ride to the airport than the kiss on the cheek at the curb.
i was obsessed for a while with shots like this: a closeup macro of someone's eye with something in the background. I've always thought, however cliché, that a lot comes through simply from eye contact, whether photographical or interpersonal. i like beth's in that it almost looks sexless, and that her eye looks somewhat aged. i'm fascinated with shots that, at least to me, suggest something about the innerworkings of someone's head, and if not the subject in particular, than something relatable to the human condition. that sounds faux-philosophical, but i mean it. surely we can all relate to the scene of one pensive eye against a terral background.
with beth, above all others, there was a palpable understanding - which is astounding to find after 8 years of not seeing someone, to realize that two completely disparate paths have brought two different individuals to exist on the same life-frequency. while i'm not really a portrait person, i took this randomly, sticking the camera in beth's face obnoxiously, hoping for candid shots. this is the sort of thing that really stimulates memory and nostalgia for me, because no one remembers people as the poses they strike in pictures; beaming smiles with chests triumphant are simply not the reality of our interactions. moments like this, where you see the half-smile, the contemplative eyes, the tousled hair - those are what speak, for me at least.
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