Torii

It was my idea this time. I remember at first she wanted to start hiking since it was becoming hard to get out of bed for both of us. We hated ourselves too much to face the day. I was feeling a dull pain in my back that was a suggestion of an inevitable vulnerability. A reminder from my body I was closer to 30 than 20. It was itself a kind of motivation. The dread of the pandemic was giving way. People were going outside again. We hiked up Runyon with friends she later discarded and I brought up the rear despising myself with every step. I got friends back in the divorce. When I made it up the last steep slope I was red from exertion and embarrassment together.

I learned to like hiking and find joy in movement. I started running with our dog. He became my dog. I slowly, painstakingly learned how to move my body and she never encouraged me. She didn’t discourage me, it would too obviously reveal her insecurity with my improving image of myself. I was desperate to be loved. We started fighting more. Arguments late in to the night I was sure the neighbors heard. Where I was sure she was feeling something and she refused to tell me no matter how brutal the fight, how mean I could get, what doors I could slam. I know now it was sound and fury for nothing. She was hiding an emptiness she couldn’t look at herself, let alone show me. Nothing about her made me more frustrated. My self-improvement was just underlining her failure and she took it out on me in insidious ways. “Don’t be yourself,” she told me over and over. Nothing was ever a joke. Being anything at all was too much for her.

It was a long drive from the airport to the side of the island we were staying on. I knew we were getting close when I started seeing signs shunning developers and tourists alike. I was unwanted even by the island. I was asking her for more than I ever had. All the needs I had disassociated from with the help of weed or scrolling I ached for as soon as the day-to-day struggle to live in the same home went away. Having nothing practical to argue about stripped away the already thin symbolism of domestic fights. No dirty dishes or forgotten date nights to obfuscate. I remember my parents divorced after a vacation and panicked.

She complained about her Mom while leaving the vacation rental. A two-story beach house 20 steps from the ocean she had rented for us all to stay in. Some locals lived downstairs. My neck felt hot thinking about what they thought of us. White tourists constantly fighting over nothing. I remember going to the beach to try and take pictures of the moon on the water but what looked ominous and significant to me didn’t translate to the photographs. Did they see me prostrate in the sand in the dark looking for a way to take something with me?

She was the maid-of-honor and she had to be the best one. She never had anything nice to say about the bride in private but the optics were critical to her and the family dynamics tied her hand. “She’s just boring,” she said. As if having your shit together was a negative. Her business had failed because she held it too tightly - unable to even let me answer an email when I offered. She quit any job that got hard. Had her mother already cut her off at this point? Was this some effort to get back on her payroll? I always knew even less than I imagined I did. She had been lying to me already for months about paying the rent. I spent money I didn’t have to get us there for her families’ sake. I drove her dad around the island and talked about his boat and how he was ordering a film crew around the harbor a long time ago.

We walked past the shrimp truck and the general store selling fishing tackle and spam musubi. The road turned up into a neighborhood where the lots were overgrown with paper thin violet blossoms that fell on to the lawns and old trucks when it rained. Neighbors waved at us and smiled. I took pictures again of the green mountains we were climbing toward up the red dirt path. They looked darker in the photos, filled with shadows. I fixed them in the edit with some artificial vibrancy. We turned a bend and stopped for photos at the signs. The wind blew in from the sea and the whole green mass of the forest shook.

The path began to incline. We passed under the three red arches and something in the air changed. I felt admonished. Under the torii I was between places. She turned to look having passed under the last arch. The trail stretched out and there was a liminality between us. The space wended and warped becoming longer than it was. Ten steps were ten thousand. There was no getting there. There was no pulling her back to where I was. The distance was too much. I felt it and stubbornly lumbered onward. I felt languid and heavy like those first steps out of desperation.

I could not tell you how long the hike was. We passed benches we did not rest at. We made no effort other than to stay apart from each other while we marched. We sweat. She took off her shirt and didn’t turn around. The ocean felt far and the air felt thicker despite the elevation. She mentioned how late we were getting here. We did not know if the trail looped back or kept going. We reached a ridge where thin trees lined either side. It stretched onward and curved out of sight. It only made sense to turn back. The sun was setting so fast up here. She looked paler than she ever has.