'Sorry Annie'

At times the lush green, the waterfalls, the black volcanic soil would find its way into his mind. Someone would say, ‘We just got back from Hawaii,’ as if they had driven into town for groceries, and he would think it possible again, almost necessary, that he go to visit the Islands.
    But then his mind would slowly populate the lush green, the volcanic cliffs from whose fractured edges water spouted crystalline, rainbows hung in the mist of its decent. Pale and newly burned Midwesterners, his parents, the sound of their honest fascination somehow cutting through the roar of the water’s leap, persistent as the dim clatter of some newly loosened item in an otherwise silent car ride.
     He would envision in terror the flight, calculate costs, feel the fine crush of coral in everything that he ate, every towel with which he dried, smell that sick-sweet smell of ocean, sun block and bug spray, and always the eyes of locals in passing, filled with distrust, unwant.
     It was nice, he’d admit that, those first few moments when he imagined dipping backpack laden into the density of some semi-rain forest, snakeless, Mount Kila something or other in the offset, poking its dormant head up out of leaves as large as car hoods. A hop skip and a jump, his father said once, of the trip over. Close your eyes and you’ll be there in no time. His father had gone to Pearl Harbor, showed him pictures of the Arizona in her ocean grave. He’d forgotten about that. God, the ghosts. The place had to be swarming with them. Swarming.