.right.

C****CrayZ (11:30:40 PM): lol i don t think u actually i have to say.. 'i went right'
C****CrayZ(11:30:47 PM): u just have to say.. i surfed
C****CrayZ(11:30:49 PM): and i think its implied
C****CrayZ(11:30:51 PM): that u went right
girl******* (11:30:58 PM): blah blah
C****CrayZ(11:31:08 PM): =)

.night surfing.

I looked at my tide calendar today and realized that tomorrow is the full moon. Here in California, such occurrences don’t translate into daily life so much. At home, over the summer it would mean M harassing me to spend 3 hours of my evening with my truck parked at Kapiolani park, longboarding at Queens by the light of the moon and the iridescent glitter of Waikiki. It would mean squinting into the darkness to watch for the slight rise and fall of a wave. It would mean L & L DriveThrough on the way home [peanut butter milkshakes and corndogs], driving into Manoa to drop M off and then up the Pali, home.
Night surfing is so much better than surfing in broad day light. There is something much more magical, more soulful about the darkness. Awkward though it is to romp the typically tourist-infested grounds of Canoes and Queens alone. To have your own wave. To be blind to the rise and fall of the wave in front of you - relying only on the feeling of the board beneath the soles of your feet and the ebb and flow of the water beneath that.

“It must be hard to imagine an ordinary future and something other than a lunar calendar to consider if you’ve grown up in a small town in Hawaii, surfing all day and night, spending half your time on sand thinking of point breaks and barrels and roundhouse cutbacks. Or maybe they don’t think about it at all. Maybe these girls are still young enough and in love enough with their lives that they have no special foreboding about their futures, no uneasy presentiment that the kind of life they are leading now might eventually have to end.”
- Susan Orlean


I think that sometimes I am one of those girls who left Hawaii and realized there was more.

.wet dreams.

I’m completely at a loss as to how to go about writing about surfing when it’s been the greater part of four months since my body has touched any part of the Pacific. Maybe, it’s because it hurts to think about it. I know that if I were to take out the Concessions surfing dvd that S. let me burn this past break, that I’ll get nostalgic and homesick all over again. I’ll have a longing for 6:30 a.m. surf sessions, sun-bronzed men with awesome backside cutbacks, for coral in the soles of my feet and salt entrenched in the smalls of my wrist.

The past few weeks I’ve been having the same dream over and over again - in it I’ve been home for over a week and realize one day that I haven’t gone surfing once. And I panic. It’s like being unprepared for a presentation or having to speak in front of a large audience. It’s a similar rendition to the dream I have about not yet having packed for a trip I’m supposed to depart for in a matter of minutes. It’s like being with a group of people and realizing that you are naked. It touches you somewhere vulnerable.
I didn’t realize it until the third night around what any of it meant. I think it speaks to my growing fear that I don’t want to return to Hawaii. Not that I won’t, but that it no longer means as much to me to everyday be able to surf, to see my family, to eat local food, to hear pigeon.

Of course the weather that I’ve been hearing about at home hasn’t helped to make any girl [or boy] homesick. Who wants to miss the thunder, lightning and flooding? My parents returned home from Kauai to find our kitchen and hallway underwater. And with all the bacteria and sewage on the south shore/Ala Wai Canal/any and all other bodies of water upon and around our beloved island, at least if I can’t surf, they can’t surf either. I’m selfish like that. And knowing me and my body's affinity for contracting fun and random illnesses I can't say that I won't be the next newspaper headline -
"Girl dies painful bacterial death from surfing on south shore." It would be me. And my parents wouldn't even love me enough to sue.

I know I'm just "posing" as a real surfer. I can already hear J. bitchin'n moanin' should he ever chance upon this. Sorry. Suck it up and deal.