The streets were thick with hot air; with the smell of crunching gravel and unfamiliar foliage. The flowers were uncharacteristically bright, incandescent; maroon and gold like cheap high heels. The houses were tired, leaning on their sides. Sighing. The people were quiet, limping with crutches, at times gesticulating ardently to nothing but sky.
My legs were white in teal shorts, three years worn and counting - my favorite favorites because I bought them at a J Crew outlet and they fit, for once. Still loyal three years later.
My headphones were scratching the inside of my ear and so I pushed them in harder; that's the only thing that really takes the sting away, I guess. I blinked and wandered down dead end street after dead end street, No Outlet signs a quiet regularity in all the solitude, trying not to think for once
Chains on fences, weeds covering the sidewalk. A layer of rain-scrubbed dirt shimmering idly over everything.
A cat far too expensive for the street meandered up to me, mildly curious, and then splayed out on the road, a grey-and-white conglomeration of fur with a tongue somewhere inside, flat and formless. The stillness was so tangible even interspersed between moaning car engines, streaking past blatantly while any eyes sober enough to see stated apathetically, unruffled by the disturbance.
TOO POOR, TOO HUMID
They let their front doors swing in their hinges, let their nephews sit on tattered lawn chairs, fading into the porch like antiqued wood, everything deteriorating as the occasional peacock strolled over the driveway, watching the socioeconomic crisis like an uninteresting firework display.
I stepped around the neon cones on the trash-littered sandbar, turning up the volume, blocking out the incessant waves. So many screaming cars. I wouldn't have heard a thing anyway.
[squawking seagulls + stillness, a detangling breeze]
"Je cherche une cle pour decouvir," accompanied by heavy bass. Feet sweating in my sandals. So many black flecks in the sand. The air was heavy enough to flatten me, but I rose.
I think I might've figured out some vital identity pieces in Hau'ula OR SOMETHING; I don't know what I believed in but somehow it meant a whole lot and I came back with branches of Hawaiian leaves in my hair, roaring Chevy trucks ringing in my blocked-out ears, my mind probably
this much
quieter.
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