Passion Fruit

When I got off the plane it dawned on me I had absolutely no agenda for the trip. No plans. What a great feeling. 

I knew my ride, Ryley, the groom to be and longtime friend from middle school, was going to be late by mainland standards. So ten seconds after walking off the plane I plopped into one of those credit card massage chairs and let it rub the rush off of me. (A new tradition.) 

Refreshed by the aloha spirit in the airport massage chair, I texted Ryley about my stoke at the lack of agenda and my sole intention to just remain present for the week. 

I must have jinxed it. 

An hour or so later I was picked up. As we drove through the pineapple and coffee fields of Kamehameha highway, I wondered about the origin of this remarkable piece of land. The Island of Oahu. Something special must have happened here long ago. Some sort of cosmic explosion of passion. There was a volcano buried deep beneath unseen waters, hardly existing until one day it bursted with orange molten fire from the core of the earth and bloomed with radiance in every life form and color, betraying part of God’s character as a mad artist. If there’s one word to describe these islands, it’s passion. 

 You can feel it when you’re here, the second you step outside, the intensity of everything. The sun is brighter and the heat more consuming. The sky is deeper and higher and although you’re at sea level, it feels like you’re somehow up in it. The ocean holds every shade of blue, and as many blues are in the water, there are more shades of green on land; in the hills, in the fields; lining every road, surrounding every house and decorating every room. The taste of the food and the smell of the air are infused with passion. Every morning is welcomed by a symphony of exotic birds. The place is magical. It’s no wonder the locals zealously protect their land from the disgracious tourists who trample through their vacations without any reverence for the sacred.

 And thank God they do protect it.

 I got caught up in this passionate place. When we got to Ryley’s house, just as I had been raptured by the beauty of the land, I was raptured by the exotic beauty of a Costa Rican girl who was living in the back house. Whatever practice of presence of mind I had developed over a year of sobriety went right out the window, along with my brain and my dignity. I fell hard, foolishly and recklessly. But it’s not like it happened immediately. It took at least two hours, while we waited for the wind to die to go for a surf. 

It’s never something you plan, getting caught up. It just happens. Suddenly, in the same house as you, there’s a sweetheart, a flower you’ve never seen before with a soft, kind voice and a softer, kinder heart. She’s making you coffee and breakfast. Then you make her laugh, a goofy laugh, the kind that comes from a pure soul, and it’s all over. 

 When I first saw her I was struck by her beauty. She fit in perfectly with the exotic island, as vibrant as the green and blue scenery all around us. She was short with tan skin, a tone body, dark brown hair. She had deep brown eyes full of grace. Windows into a house I wanted to live in forever. This is exactly the point I should have been warning myself to settle down. Be cool. Don’t lose your head. Don’t blow it. But these thoughts were nowhere to be seen.

The next morning, less than twelve hours since we met, I asked her for a kiss, then spent the rest of the trip trying to dig myself out of that hole. Here’s what happened:

Historically, I have fileted myself at the first hint of the possibility of love. I could sense there was an attraction between us and the bubbles in my love pot started to boil. The feeling was mutual, according to my biased, borderline delusional perspective, which was initiated back home through a mysterious anticipation that something good was going to happen on this trip. I had a sense I was going to meet someone or that somehow this trip would determine my future, so I was looking for signs. 

When the wind died and we went to surf, I got my first sign. As a surfer, Hawaiian waves are as close to heaven as it gets. I had an ethereal session. The entire thing felt like deja vu. In the center of God’s grace it was easy to believe all my wildest dreams would come true. I was frothing. 

So the next morning, still high on the stoke from last night’s session, when by fate I found myself in the same kitchen as the girl, and then at the same table, with fresh cups of coffee and nowhere to be, in the middle of a great conversation, I couldn’t help but go for it. 

We sat at the table, drinking coffee and talking about life. She wore an oversized t-shirt with her smooth brown legs coming out of the bottom like she was a passion fruit popsicle. She wore no makeup, just a smile that crunched her cheeks. We talked about our families, our childhood, and the present seasons of our relationships with God. I discovered she too had a broken heart and we both acknowledged the ticking clock. To me the birds were chirping, to her it was a simple conversation with a friend of a friend, a kind she had had a thousand times. I became mesmerized by her lips. 

The desire to kiss her was like a fire that smoked out any sense of rational thinking. I couldn’t focus on the conversation. The only way I could put out the fire was to speak on it. 

 “Can I ask you something pretty straightforward?” I said, turning red. 

 “Uh-oh…”, said her silent face.

I was too committed. 

 “Can I kiss you?”

 Silence. 

 I began to fall from the sky.

 She blushed and giggled and put her head down and became cute in a political sort of way. 

 “Aw, I’m flattered,” she said, “but I don’t think it would be very wise.”

 Then I said a lot of words in a row. I tried to justify it by explaining that I just had one of the best sessions of my life and thought everything was destined to work out in my favor so I just went for it. I guess I thought she was going to be as recklessly bashful as me. She wasn’t. 

 At this point, all was not lost. I could have thrown it in reverse and toned it all down, like any sane person would have. Instead, I made matters worse by texting, the cardinal sin of crushes. I used really romantic lines like, “If you’re cold, I can come keep you warm” and “life is short, life is very short,” except I wrote it in Spanish because that would really make her understand my point. I texted other things that would make girls cringe and wince with pain and my guy friends howl with laughter. (Re-reading these texts was an eye opening experience. Was I high? Was I drunk? Unfortunately, no. I had lost my mind.) However, she was responding with political kindness, even mentioning that she admired my courage. It only added fuel to the fire and kept the belief alive that I could win her over.

 In my head, I know that girls like boys who can play it cool. But when I meet someone and conclude they are wifey material in the first twenty minutes, it’s too late. The only thing that makes sense is to just go for it. Jump. Spill. I get vulnerable and ride valiantly towards the vague possibility of a mutual, irresponsible surrender of the heart. The thing is, it’s worked before in my life, twice, and I had the same feeling then that I had this time: an immediate conviction that this girl, who I just met, is worth dying for. (Pray for me.)

 But oh Cosmic God of Love!, in the days that followed there were signs I just couldn’t ignore. One night, I was able to convince her to come to the beach with me by promising I wasn’t going to try any “funny business.” I taught her how to find the North Star by using the Big Dipper. I told her about the most tender moment I ever had with God. We saw a shooting star. I talked too much and didn’t ask enough questions. You know, the usual behavior of a hypnotized boy. In response to my flailing, she explained to me while laughing that there is a certain phrase at home to describe my efforts. Colnillos. Fangs. “He is dragging his fangs.” As she laughed, I couldn’t tell whether it was good or bad, cute or cringe. I took the positive interpretation and pressed on. 

 With jaded optimism I continued to see signs. I learned we have the same taste in music. She played incredible music the whole trip. Every song she played, I liked. A couple times, I found us singing along to the same songs. That first morning we had coffee, before I got weird, she showed me one of her favorites and talked about the tattoo she wants to get from one of the lyrics. “...life is okay.” I resonated with that. I’d been trying to remind myself of the same thing for the past year. 

 We went for a surf with a bunch of people and rode three waves together, in a row. Three!

We saw two little twin boys at a concert, acting like monkeys, and agreed we wanted kids like that.

I learned she was a gymnast.

Then one morning, a few hours into the day, she suddenly gasped and said, “Oh my gosh! Are you hungry?” Yes, I was. I think that’s when she officially wifey material. 

Later that night, I doubled down on embarrassing texts, like an absolute kook. I basically explained that I wanted to marry her and tried to tempt her with the idea of becoming a U.S. citizen. Maybe we could live in Hawaii together and have twin boys? She didn’t respond. 

I started to realize I had blown it. 

So I bought a ticket to Costa Rica for the next week. “To surf, yeah just to surf”, I explained publicly. Fifty one percent of my motivation. 

Unfortunately, like the prototypical male I can be, I spaced on a major event that had been on my calendar for months: my Mom’s graduation and fulfillment of a lifelong dream. I had to unbook the trip. “What a relief,” she probably thought.  

After this embarrassing send and unsend debacle, combined with my middle school level text message game, my brain finally caught up to me and started convincing me to call it quits. I started to feel shame and regret. Like my mom always told me, “Zachary, you made your bed, now lay in it.” It was time I switched to a little self-preservation for whatever dignity I had left. 

Then the wedding came. 

I wasn’t even supposed to be in the wedding, but the groom is a last minute connoisseur in classic Hawaiian fashion. I found myself at the Rip Curl store the day before the wedding getting an off-white shirt to match the other groomsmen. I’m not sure when they were told they were going to be included, but with the exception of the best man, the groom’s brother, it could not have been earlier than three days. I was told the day of the rehearsal. 

During the rehearsal, I was lined up to walk down the aisle, post wedding kiss, with another cute girl who had provided a much needed distraction from my original obsession. Welp! Wasn’t meant to be, I concluded. It’s official. I can move on now.

Lo and behold, on the day of the wedding, there was an extra groomsman who had missed the rehearsal. Now, I quickly realized, I was lined up to walk with her. 

My mind said, “Ignore it.”

My heart said, “We’re back baby! Officially meant to be.” 

During the ceremony, I thought we made eye contact a few times. Her hair blew across her face in the gentle ocean breeze. She might have just been looking at the mountains behind me. Or possibly she was re-considering my qualification for soul mate based on my new shirt and the fact we were now lined up to walk together. I probably don’t need to tell you I went with the latter. 

She took my arm and I said, “It’s a sign.”

She laughed and shook her head. Colnillos. 

Then came the worst and best sign of them all. Worst because I sincerely was trying to move on and enjoy the wedding. Best because, well, I deeply trusted my instinct about this particular female.

While my good friend was pulling the garter off his wife’s leg with his teeth, I decided I was not going to participate in the tradition which would follow. If they made a big deal about it, I was not going to try and catch it. I suddenly cared about not appearing like a desperate fool.

Well, the DJ kinda did make a big deal out of it and I walked onto the dance floor (which was a certain grass section in the backyard). I saw the groom was aiming the thing high and to the right, his right hand pointed high overhead and his left hand pulling the garter back like a slingshot. I stood at the back left of the pack of single men, at least three paces away from anybody. Judging by his aim, surely, it was going to go straight up and whoever was in front would run forward to catch it. The groom let go and the light blue, lace garter fluttered in the air like some deep sea amoeba, twenty feet high and way to the right. Then I watched as it caught the wind, changed direction and flew straight over my head. Without moving my feet or jumping, I reached my left hand up and it flew right into my palm. 

I was perplexed. Excited and angry. Stoked and frustrated. Are you playing tricks on me God? Is this funny to you?

But I was thrilled, too. It was the way it caught the wind and soared right to me. I didn’t even try. Afterwards, I thought maybe she would come running up to me and say, with her adorable accent, “Oh my gosh! You caught it. I can see it now. We’re meant to be.”

And then I might say, “I know, crazy right? But let’s take it slow…”

I decided not to overplay this one and just let it marinate. The only thing it marinated was my mushy, rotten chicken breast of hope that should have been disposed of yesterday. For the rest of the night, wherever I was, she was on the other side of the venue. We didn’t even get to dance together.

I spent the next few days after the wedding licking my wounds. I knew I had been defeated and possibly even lost a friend. So, like all good poets, I decided to go down in flames, kamikaze style, Custard’s last stand, ala Shakespeare. I wrote her a nine page letter, the outline to this blog post, threw a Hau Hele flower on top, wrapped it in the torn out pages of a surf magazine, gave it to her at the airport and called it a vacation. Because going out with a bang is an alcoholic’s form of closure.

On the way home I contemplated what was wrong with me. I was disappointed in myself. Why am I like this? What happened to me that I needed to win this girl over so badly? What about all my deep inner work through sobriety? Where did that go? In a matter of one week, I went from a confident warrior to a buzzing mosquito. 

Through AA, I learned to develop a daily practice of hitting my knees the second I woke up to surrender the day to God, choose to be sober and ask for his help. It’s called “praying in;” a daily practice to incorporate the 3rd step, “We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God…” I hadn’t done that. I experienced what happens when I take matters into my own hands and try to force an outcome of my choosing. 

I concluded I had an emotional relapse. The root of my addiction was a breakup with my high school sweetheart which leveled my self-worth. I always had a tendency to make a girl the solution to life’s meaningless void. Girls can be touched and held, they can make you coffee and breakfast, while God remains in the sky and in my imagination. But earthly love is not the ultimate solution to our existential longing. This misplacement of worship, idolatry of any form, always leads to pain and disappointment because only God can fill the meaningless void with His unconditional love. That’s the way we were designed. Anything we place in front of that truth will cause us to go over the falls and smack the reef. I forgot about that. 

On the flight home, I did something I never could in the dysfunction of my partying days. I received grace and rebounded. I moved on by practicing gratitude. By the time I landed in San Diego, I was thankful for a valuable lesson learned and for another sober “first”: my first sober crush and “sprout” of emotion towards a girl since my ex, a sign that I’m healing. 

I was thankful to still be sober. I did something really stupid and painful and didn’t take a drink over it. Hallelujah! (If I was drinking, this kind of thing would have created cataclysmic self-pity and reckless behavior.) 

I was thankful for the dozen new friends I made at the wedding, who deserve their own separate story. 

I was thankful for warm water and fun waves. 

I was thankful to have a funny story to write. I accepted the reality of human folly and how God’s mysterious ways can work around my ability to misinterpret the signs. 

In the soothing presence of grace, I was able to laugh at myself as the human being that I am. I’m broken and it’s okay. I make mistakes and God still loves me. I’m a passionate, poetic, hopeless romantic who one day will fall in love with the girl of my dreams, while keeping God in first place. Hawaii wasn’t formed in a day, but in a series of eruptions over time. I’m still in formation. I know that one day a hot magma love will break the surface and form a tropical relationship teeming with life. I know that process won’t be created by too much texting.