Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

This wasn’t just one of those things. Oh my son. Now we know that none of it was. And this was when I started to believe.

Years already I’d been trying to understand what was inside me, while the rest of the world was trying to tear it out.

there were things growing in me that made me believe I could turn into those dreams.

Angry and laughing at the same time, hurting each other enough you know it could only be love.

That same king feeling in my chest, ancient and big.

Just again his shadow, shaped like a sister.

If only you knew me, Mom, I wanted to say.

She never said shit like this to the boys, only to me. Like I was supposed to be guilty of ambition while they were just living their full potential.

“It sounds like they’re searching for each other,” I said. “But if you listen closer . . . none of them are actually lost.”

Sometimes I don’t know if the fight finds me or I find the fight. Especially with my family.

She could see what the mainland was doing to me, okay? What it was giving me. Big-sky space, opportunities, and oxygen to burn and burn and burn bright.

That was the summer I learned: almost anything becomes tolerable if you get yourself a routine.

But that’s the problem with the present, it’s never the thing you’re holding, only the thing you’re watching, later, from a distance so great the memory might as well be a spill of stars outside a window at twilight.

“I’ve been to the mainland, I’ve traveled to San Francisco and Chicago and New York City. There’s something here, in Hawai‘i, that’s bigger than all those Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous places.

a god whose fingers were shaped like rifles and whose voice sounded like treaties waiting to be broken.

When our language, ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i, was outlawed, so our gods went, so prayers went, so ideas went, so the island went.

Hope can be a god as well. It’s something that can be prayed to.

But home should be safe, right? That’s the point of home.

You and me wreck the world, not the other way around.

He said people think force and power is the same thing, but really force is what you use when you don’t got power.

God, these men. Why is it they always pull their hurt up inside themselves, gulp it down into the quiet corners of their soul, clench it like a muscle?

I’ve learned that laughter is the first wall he puts up against the hurt of the world. The walking he’s doing now is what comes after that wall is smashed apart.

We both know everything there is to know about him now.

There’s aloha yet, to keep the rest of us alive.

If someone were to ask me what money means this would be what I would say: The world feels like it will stay under you no matter what you do.

“Make a list, all those people,” I say. “I’ll kill ’um. Even their dogs. Matter fact, I’ll do the dogs twice.”

If she doesn’t beg, exactly, there’s still a quiet resignation to the mother. There’s still a kneeling, and opening of the palms upward, asking for something to be placed in them. Hands that used to push and take and grip their own way through the world.

This is it. This is Hawai‘i.

it’s the quiet that’s violent.

“I like you,” he said. “Way salty, this one.”

I ask Mom if love ever made her feel alone. If it ever made her feel like she was starving in a room full of food. She laughs. “Only every day.”

“I can always feel the change, after I choose. The better versions of myself, moving just out of reach.”

Big destiny is a thing you get drunk on.

“Part of me gonna stay down in the valley like that forever. Just chasing him. Part of me ain’t never coming back up. You know?”