Malia Collins
All of the Places We Prayed for a Miracle
Hakioawa
We see Kahoʻolawe from the ocean first:
red flanks slope down to water,
lava-rock sea cliffs,
and an open-mouthed cave, to the left of the landing spot, home of the shark god
Kamohoaliʻi, who used his tail to guide lost ships home.
So much water around this island, but none inside of it, the water table cracked,
the uplands desert dry, hardpan soil blown clean across the face.
The zodiac drops us a hundred yards off shore. We swim in with our dry bags buoyed underneath us. Everything here is shaped by wind: tops of the wiliwili trees razored flat, shirred edges of a canvas flag whip against each other. Ocean, shore, rocks, red dirt. Red dirt flats and then small piles of red dirt and vines growing over the piles, next to them scattered batches of sunburnt sticks tangled up in green fishing net. Driftwood placed end to end marks the start of the trail that leads from the shore of Hakioawa up past the campsite to the kitchen and shelter. One of the forks in the trail cuts from the beach up to a stand of keawe trees. This is where we’ll sleep for the next three nights. We hang our hammocks from the branches. Bright blue hammocks in the middle of the red: the dirt, the keawe trees with their thorns sharp as arrow tips. A venomous scolopendra centipede scurries from one side of the campsite to the other. My husband, Josh, strings a line of nylon rope between a bleached-out surfboard and a tree branch for us to clip our bags and towels so the centipedes can’t crawl in. At the end of the clothesline is the view across the channel, the summit of Haleakala rising up out of the clouds. The fingernail crescent of Molokini Island to the right. It is said that from the air Kahoʻolawe looks like a baby sleeping.
Memory
When I was six, my parents took me on a hike to the summit of Mt. Kaʻala in the Waianae Range, on the west side of Oʻahu. My father’s high school girlfriend, Samantha, and her husband Mark were visiting from Fresno and early on their first night with us Samantha told my father, in her breathy, no-bra voice, that she had always dreamed of hiking through a cloud forest.
“We can do that,” my father said.
Samantha clapped her hands.
“Tourists,” my brother said.
My father liked to say it only took a couple of minutes before you knew something was a disaster: it was raining, they had the wrong shoes—Samantha wore strappy silver sandals, Mark had on a pair of Birkenstocks. Samantha’s white blouse was soaked by the time we found the trailhead, her nipples puckered pink and windswept. Samantha was exciting to me in a way my mother wasn’t and I showed her things on the trail I thought she’d love: spiky, red ‘ohia blossoms, a dragonfly whose body was the same color red. I hiked with no t-shirt, like my brother, and told Samantha to take her top off so it could dry. I heard my father cough. We stopped at a palapalai patch to eat lunch and gather ferns for lei. My brother stood at the edge of the clearing pretending to dive into the clouds that gathered and swirled at his feet. Samantha pressed the ferns against her wet skin and I copied her. The wind tunneled through us. Mark took a picture of his wife and then asked me to take one of the two of them. The clouds kept rising. It got quiet except for the sounds of the wind and where a moment before I could see everyone with me, now it was like the cloud swallowed me where I stood, and the air around me—thick enough to chew and clinging—closed in. I couldn’t see or hear sounds beyond my own breath. “Somebody?” I said. “Somebody?”
To keep us from exploring very far up the mountain behind our house, my mother told stories about days like this one, where the clouds moved in and hikers couldn’t tell where the sky was, or where the ground began and ended. “They panic and start walking, when they should just stay put. The clouds come in like that so fast, it’s easy to get disoriented and fall off the cliff.”
“And then what?” I asked.
“You’re dead, then what,” my brother said while my mother nodded gravely next to him.
This is what I thought about as I stood there. I don’t remember if it was seconds or minutes. I
don’t remember if I was crying but I think I probably was.
Then I heard my father say, “Malia, get down on all fours.”
“I’m too scared,” I said.
“I bet you are, but you need to get down on your hands and knees until you’re flat
against the ground. Can you try that?” he said.
I put my hands on my knees. “Good,” he said, “Keep going.”
My father held onto my arm and we slowly crouched down until my cheek was against the wet
grass, my father’s hand firm on my back. We stayed that way until the cloud lifted.
“You ok?” he said. I nodded and held onto him.
Another language
There is a Hawaiian legend that tells the story of Molokini, an islet between Maui and Kahoʻolawe. The story goes, two lizards, Puʻuhale and Puʻuokali, marry and Puʻuokali quickly became pregnant with a daughter they name Puʻuoinaina. She was a lizard, too. After she was born, her parents sent her to live alone on Kahoʻolawe. The island was the most sacred of all the islands and neither chiefs nor commoners were allowed to live there. Puʻuoinaina was young and beautiful and two brothers, both birds, flew over the island from where they lived on Maui, saw her bathing in the ocean, and swooped down to marry her. When the winds were right, the brothers flew across the channel to see their beloved, but they had other things to tend to and the visits in between grew longer and longer. Puʻuoinaina got lonely, and soon fell in love with Lohiau, the husband to Pele, the notoriously vengeful and jealous volcano goddess. When Pele found out about the two lovers, she tried to fly to Kahoʻolawe, but Puʻuhale, in an attempt to save his daughter, blocked her path. Pele turned in the other direction and waded out to sea. When Puʻuoinaina heard the anger in Pele’s voice, so ashamed for what she had done, she jumped into the ocean to hide. Once underwater, she stretched herself from one island to the other. Seeing her under the water, and awash in a fit of jealousy—Pele grabbed her body and flung it, breaking into three parts. The tail landed and became the dome at Makena Beach, the curve of Molokini Island her body, and then her head—a six-foot tall rock wall that squats cracked and twisted on the slopes of Kahoʻolawe—halfway down the trail between the rain shrine and camp.
Her father, overcome with grief, turned his lizard body into the hills overlooking the channel so he could watch his daughter forever.
Place
The first time I saw Kahoʻolawe was with my father. It was the summer solstice, June 2018. We were part of a group on a three-day service trip. He was getting weak by then, the Hodgkin’s Lymphoma gone for five years and now back, but we talked him into going because we believed he could heal there. He shuffled when he walked, and used my hiking sticks to clamber up the rocks to the bluff where we chanted up the sun and watched the light crest over Haleakala. At the moment when the crater at the top of Haleakala held the sun like a small, glowing ball in its palm, the mountain looked cut in two—one half dark, the other in the light. My father waited until everyone else was gone before he let us help him up. My sister took one hand, I held the other. After that, two young firefighters who were on the trip watched my father with us, one kept close behind, the other stayed by his side. My father looked unsteady, and disappointed–he knew how many people it took to take care of him. But the father part of him—the fixer, the engineer, the unflappable father part of him—he was still there. When we set up camp and found the hooks for the hammocks were missing, my father jerry-rigged new ones out of bungee cord. When the stakes for the tent broke, he found a long, skinny stick and lashed it across the top of the tent and attached it to the clothesline. To keep the wind from covering the surfaces in the kitchen with red dirt, he hung a curtain made out of canvas tarp from the rafters and secured the flaps with clothespins when the winds picked up. At dinner the first night, when the gusts blew down from the mountains out to sea, the dirt that usually came with the them, the red dirt that blew into our mouths and hair and settled across the tables, on the children, in the giant fairytale pots that boiled away on the stove—was kept out. He was helpful. He was alive and he was helpful. We took him to Kahoʻolawe because his sickness was just a setback, that’s all. We took him to Kahoʻolawe to heal.
Another Language
Kahoʻolawe is a wahi pana—a storied place—and although archeological evidence shows the island was inhabited for over 1,000 years—for the past two-hundred and fifty at least, it’s been uninhabited. In 1779, ship captains passing the southwestern tip of the island wrote they saw, “neither houses, trees, nor any cultivation, destitute of both water and wood.” It was used as a men’s penal colony in the 1800s, and then a holding ground for the goats, sheep, and cattle the Hawaiian royalty received as gifts, who ravaged the land for hundreds of years and left it over-grazed and deeply eroded. Red hills leading down into the ocean look cut open and exposed like insides, a striation of fire scars fingered across its belly. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy took over the island and for nearly fifty years used it as a bombing range and training ground for target practice. While the other Hawaiian islands were given nicknames like the Gathering Isle, the Garden Isle, even the Forbidden Isle, a circle of bright, painted car tires stacked twenty deep and the size of two footballs fields—gave Kahoʻolawe its former nickname—the Target Isle. After the live-fire bombing exercises stopped in 1990, the control of the island was transferred from the Navy back to the state of Hawaii. The target was removed, and the island is slowly healing. It has become a puʻuhonua, or refuge, for Hawaiians. A place to revitalize Hawaiian cultural practices. There is a spot on the island, where the akua, or gods, the ancestors, the land, and the ocean converge. This is the spot where my father will get better.
Dust
Boise, Idaho: Once, when he thought no one was looking, my father bent over the deck railing and rubbed his hands over his head and his hair floated down, past the wisteria and the dogwood trees; like dust, or feathers, like little silver pins. So many things falling all at once. I wanted to put my hands out to catch it, the way my children put their hands out to catch it whenever it was snowing. I wanted to gather the pieces up, push all the hair back in, but I didn’t move. I stood there, my hand on my mouth, while my father’s hair hit the ground and mixed with birdseed and twigs and winter-rotting leaves.
Hakioawaiki
After breakfast, they assign tasks for the day. Josh and the kids, my sister, and I are on trail maintenance. They ask my father to stay back at camp to help in the kitchen. We follow a group of folks up the mountain to where the hardpan soil ends and the brush begins. In the ravine next to the trail are boulders and our job is to carry the boulders and set them between the fiberglass posts demarcating the path. At first, I’m afraid to move the rocks. I’m superstitious. In Hawaii, everything is alive—the rocks, the pili grass, the keawe trees. And since everything is alive, it’s in its place because it belongs there. Aunty Davi, the professor who’s in charge of the trail crew sees my hesitation. “You can move the rocks,” she tells me. “You’re Hawaiian. This place belongs to you.”
We dislodge, lift, and carry the boulders to the trail, barely talking, until afternoon. When they call break time, the kids don’t want to stop. One of the women on the trail crew pulls a plastic pouch of ‘awa honey from her backpack. My kids see her coming and open their mouths like baby birds. She squeezes strands of it into their mouths and they smile. Max says it makes his body relax, but his mind go. I shake my head when she offers me some. My hands are swollen the size of flippers.
Since there is no freshwater on Kahoʻolawe we bathe at Hakioawaiki, the green sand cove about a mile west of camp. In the late afternoon, women call kapu there. When they call kapu, men are forbidden from entering the beach and knowing that, all of the women take their swimsuits off. We sit in a line train style and rub the green sand across each other’s backs and into our skin and hair. Some of the women run into the water and rinse off, others stretch out on the rocks just below the path that connects where we sleep to where we bathe. Covered in the green sand, the sun hitting spots like they’re lit up from within, the women look like something magical washed up on shore. Tiny particles of plastic and olivine tangle in our hair.
Fires
Early the next morning, across the channel at Maʻalaea, the flats where east and west Maui meet, a brush fire starts. In the morning, the fire is low and half of the people at camp think it’s a dust storm. But by afternoon it has spread and by early evening, when we’re bathing at Hakioawaiki, the smoke has risen so high we can’t see any of Maui—and from the bay where we swim and my children float on their backs with their eyes closed, it feels like we’re the only people left in the world. The clouds and sky are the color of smoke. Ash from the flames blows across the channel.
Hoʻailona
Hawaiians believe in hoʻailona, or signs. On Kahoʻolawe, where the veil between the living world and the spirit world is thin, there are hoʻailona everywhere. On the day we visit the graves for George Helm and Kimo Mitchell, a musician and a waterman, who were lost at sea after leaving Kahoʻolawe on surfboards, we see two pilot whales swimming side by side. The next morning, half of the camp works in the ocean, the other half lines the imu, or oven, with flat rocks. While we clear the rocks from the zodiac landing spot, a pod of spinner dolphins stretches across the bay, flipping almost as if in a chorus line, and everyone runs down to the shore to watch. Later that same afternoon a Hawaiian monk seal cruises by close to shore, and beaches in the same spot where the zodiac comes up on land.
The Conditional
Our last night on Kahoʻolawe, we take my father to the hale pili, the thatched-roof house at the piko, or center of Hakioawa. It is a sacred place on this sacred island, and we stand in a circle, holding hands, while my sister prays. They’re shutting down camp, and give us this time alone, as a family. Outside the wind picks up and blows through the camp, through the hale where we’re standing, and up mountain past the fishing shrines. Feral kittens mew like babies. Sometimes in those prayer circles I can find a way to float above them, much the way my father did when he convinced himself that he could hypnotize his way out of a movie theater. My father hated movies, but he loved my mother, and I remember how he thrilled the night he called me and said—“Malia, I’ve figured out how I can be with your mom in the theater, but I can make my mind go somewhere else and so I’m still at a movie with her, but not really.” Because I think we are beyond prayers now, and need something divine at this point, something geological, something that will take my father’s sickness, pull whatever is inside of him out to sea, the tentacles of it scraping against the rocks on shore, past the cave that’s home of the shark god. And once he’s in the deepest part of the ocean, the waves will rise up and then disappear, taking the sick father and leaving behind one who is healed. This is the story I want to be true.
We sing the doxology in Hawaiian.
My daughter squeezes my hand tight.
I can’t imagine what he thinks being in the middle of this place where the gods and the ocean and the living intersect. Where he has to go in his mind to be able to hold it. My children wrap their hands around his elbows to keep him steady. Like my father did when he was physically in the movies with my mother, but in his mind far away, I learn how to live partway inside of these moments. I’m scared, and think he must be as well, but when I ask him later he says—I’m not scared because I know I’m going to get better.
If I were to rewrite the legend of Puʻuoinaina, mine would sound like this: lovers and jealousy aside, so her body will stay whole, Puʻuoinaina jumps in the water not as a way to escape, but as a means to enter her water spirit form. A way to live outside of the water and also underneath it.
What if my father could jump in the ocean?
What if the form he’s supposed to be is waiting for him under the water?
Memory
For the year before my father died, I dreamed about the ocean. I dreamed that I was at the ocean, and there was a deck around it, like a swimming pool. The water in my dream was tangled with ocean life—black-tipped reef sharks, eels pumped full of tiny Christmas lights, and pods of whales darted back and forth between where I stood and the open ocean. In my dream, when I jumped in, everything in the water except for me would sink down and for a moment I would have a clear path in front of me. I dreamt once someone asked me my father’s name and I answered—it’s the Forgotten Isle.
Fires
On Saturday, February 21st, 2020, a brush fire broke out on the southwestern end of Kahoʻolawe. Because the island is only 75% surface cleared of unexploded ordinance, remnants from decades of bombing by the U.S. Navy, it was too dangerous to allow firefighters on the island. They could only watch the fire burn from the shores of the surrounding islands, or from the sky. And after a week with no intervention, the fire scorched more than 9,000 acres, approximately 30% of the island. It’s the helplessness of those firefighters I can’t shake. When my father got sick, we watched, and there was no way to stop it. But unlike Kahoʻolawe, the doctors went in any way they could and still it didn’t heal what started in 2011, left in 2013, and then laid dormant until 2018. The sickness that, even when we thought he was well, was inside of him, underneath the brush and tangle of him, waiting there. The oncologist used the word, percolating.
Leaving
The summer of 2019, we spent two months home on Oʻahu, and the night we left my father went into the hospital. Two weeks later he died there. We said goodbye to him huddled in the emergency exit alcove at the Boise Airport. I heard him breathing, but he didn’t say anything. At the San Francisco airport, we said goodbye again at Gate 64 while we waited to board our flight to Honolulu. On the flight I thought about all of the places we prayed for a miracle. We thought the ocean would heal him, we thought the doctors would heal him, the medicine, and then Kahoʻolawe, we thought the cancer specialists at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill would heal him. My parents bought tickets for a river cruise to Oberammergau because my father was going to get better.
The flight attendant handed out the agricultural form the airlines makes every family fill out on the way to Hawaiʻi, and there was a space to answer the question—what is the purpose of your trip? Because I was afraid of what I would forget and what I had ready forgotten, I started a list in the Notes app on my phone called, Words that Make Me Come Undone after My Father Died:
Love birds
Bird seed
Radishes
Turducken
Celery
Small kine
I bet
Water aerobics
The Y
Hilton Head
Cajun power
Christmas lights
Leg of lamb
Prime Rib
Moonstruck
SFO
Rhapsody in Blue
Rhubarb Pie
D
Huit oeufs
Cookies
I’m only having one cookie
Janis Ian
Jim Croce
Leroy Brown
Floodlights
Lifeguard stand
What is the purpose of your trip?
Search History
The morning after my father died, we woke up and drove to Kailua Beach for sunrise, the way we had so many Saturday mornings, this time the first time without my father. We set up our beach chairs next to the lifeguard stand, took off our beach dresses and t-shirts, and walked down to the shore, the sky orange and pink, the water milky from the heat. A woman who has been walking the beach since I can remember passed by with her dog, an old golden retriever, named Sadie.
My Zen Buddhist priest friend Norma says when the people we love die they come back in another form. So I believe when I’m looking at Sadie, I’m looking at my father, and when Sadie leaves and the ‘iwa birds fly overhead I watch as one breaks off from the others and flies out over the bay to Popoia Island and I pretend that’s my father, too. The water I’m in becomes my father, and the wind and the sand and the waves. I submerge myself and look up through the ocean to the sky and think—nothing bad will happen if we’re all underwater, but when I come up this time it doesn’t work, because my father is dead. I want to tell Norma it would be easier if I could just have my father back so I don’t have to pretend the world and what’s in it is him. Norma says once we name things they stop being the thing and become the metaphor. After my father dies, Norma puts her hands on my shoulders and holds my gaze. She makes a sweeping motion with her fingers, flutters them from my shoulders down to my wrists, trying to loosen the sadness while she talks to me in her gentle voice, her Norma voice. I want her to stop looking at me with such tenderness because the pain is right behind my lips. If I open my mouth, I think instead of a voice my broken heart will fall out.
“Now he’s everywhere,” she says.
“But I don’t want him to be everywhere,” I say. “I want him in his person in front of me.”
“I know. But that’s living in the metaphor,” she says.
“If I’m not living in the metaphor, where do I live?
“In the real world,” she says. “In your real life. Your father wouldn’t want you to stay stuck in the object, the subject, and the verb of your love.”
“I know he wouldn’t,” I say. “But he wouldn’t be surprised.”
When the ancient Hawaiians paddled their canoes from Tahiti to Hawaii, the ‘iwa birds were their hoʻailona, their sign that landfall was just ahead. That morning, when the ‘iwa bird flew out over the water I thought—it’s his sign to me. This is how he’s saying he’s still here. He’s showing me how to orient myself in this world now, in the metaphor of things.
Scattering His Ashes
We scatter my father’s ashes at Kailua Beach on Sunday, August 25th at sunrise. There’s a light rain, and the tail end of a Portuguese-man-o-war invasion that has pocked the beaches so full of their blue bodies the sand looks like blueberry muffins. We take out four outrigger canoes. My sister has arranged for three women from the canoe club to steer three of the canoes, and our friend Luna steers the canoe carrying my mom, my brothers, my sister, and me. My kids climb in and sit on the ʻiako—the wooden section that connects the ama to the canoe itself. The waves are up and the water choppy. We paddle to a spot halfway between the beach and Popoia Island. The four canoes hold in a pattern—one canoe in every direction.
My earliest memory of this spot is of me, my father, an orange floater surfboard, and my favorite bikini—the orange and yellow bikini with the yellow plastic ring that held both sides of the top together. I was maybe eight. My father and I paddled out on a day when the water was clear enough to see to the bottom. He held onto the board while I practiced diving. That day I could see everything—yellow tangs, octopus with their open-umbrella bodies, like long skirts floating. I dove for what seemed like the whole afternoon. When we got back to the beach, my mother stood there, her hands clenched, angry at my father for taking me out for so long. She didn’t speak to either of us for the rest of the night. Years later, when I was getting ready to leave Hawaiʻi for college I thought of my top three memories of home—that day was number two.
Max and Mehana pull out bags of plumeria flowers and white rose petals we stripped from a particularly morbid funeral wreathe one of my father’s work acquaintances sent to the church the day before. The flowers and petals float in a cluster towards the middle of the boats.
My father’s ashes are divided into small plastic Ziploc bags marked with his name—Hank Gellert—across the front. I gently pour his ashes into the ocean. Some of them blow back onto my teeth. He sinks so quickly. There are traces of silver in my bag from my father’s crowns. Once all of the ashes are gone, I rinse the bag and tuck it in my pocket. Later I will wish I hadn’t rinsed the bag. I ache in places unknown to me.
Wailing
When someone in a Hawaiian family dies, mourners come to visit and announce their arrival by wailing. They wail from the sidewalk, and slowly up the driveway towards the house, carrying lei or food or hoʻokupu, and wail until they reach the front door and are invited in. They wail so everyone around will know that a family is grieving. They wail so everyone will know something has changed. When we scatter my father’s ashes, my Aunty Kehau wails from her canoe, and the other aunties join in. I think how much pain a human heart can bear and then more comes. My mom’s voice cracks as she cries out to the water—Aloha mai, aloha mai. We sing “Hawaii Aloha” while we paddle back to shore. No one knows what to do once it’s over. I want the water to make us feel better. Mehana asks—“can we swim for a little while?” While the kids swim we gather in a semi-circle: my brothers and sister, Josh and my mom. The rituals we learned growing up in this place come back to me. This is the part where we stay in the water until whatever thoughts or feelings aren’t serving us, we let go of, because the ocean can bear it better than we can. We stand in a semi-circle so our ancestors have space to join. My father is now my ancestor. I want to swim through a tangle of him, in the ocean I grew up swimming, the one my father went back to, the one we scattered him into.
And yet. Even in that sadness our bodies do what they’ve always done in this place—we stay afloat. Mehana sees a wave building just past the reef and my brother says—“You want to catch it,” and Mehana gets in position. My brother gives her a push when the wave is still building and once she’s on top of it, we call to her—kick, kick, kick, kick, kick. She body surfs to shore, turns back around to swim out and try again. She is beaming. I can feel the aliveness in her from where I’m standing. It was a morning my father would have loved to be in.
So Many Places to Pray for a Miracle
The Kahoʻolawe fire that began on February 21st burned for a week, advancing unattended along the island’s northern coast. It destroyed several structures, incinerated trucks, ATVs, and hundreds of landscaping tools. Everything needed to bring the island back to itself.
Protect Kahoʻolawe ‘Ohana, the group who led our service trip to Hakioawa, sends an e-mail call to action asking for strong prayers to manifest the naʻulu, the abundant rains, that form upland on Maui and travel across the channel to Moaʻulaiki, the rain shrine on Kahoʻolawe that faces Haleakala.
My daughter says, “Do you remember when we took water to the rain shrine and it literally started raining? We need that to happen again.” We ask my mom and my sister to pray, we tell them to ask the rest of the aunties, too.
Within a day of the call for strong prayers, my daughter comes into my room. “The fire’s out,” she said. “And it’s still raining over there.”
In a news interview, one of the members of the Protect Kahoʻolawe ‘Ohana said their calls for rain were answered. “This is what our elders had done when they needed rain,” she said. “They would call for rain.”
I envied the certainty of their prayers. I envied how they named their miracle into the world and it happened. I think of all of the fathers I prayed for them to take before mine.
Another Language
The entire island of Kahoʻolawe is situated in the rain shadow of Haleakala. It averages less than 26 inches of rainfall a year. A rain shadow is caused by mountains blocking weather systems that produce moisture and ultimately rain. Because of this, they cast on the areas behind them a shadow of dry landscape.
Every family is formed by its own geology. The events that took place inside of my parents’ life long before I arrived shaped the landscape of what we would become. If my father was the mountain range, my mother was the rain shadow. I don’t know what happens to the dry land that has sat forever in the shadow of a mountain when that mountain suddenly disappears. Is the land that’s left too far gone to come back? Or is it like the fires, a way to reintroduce what should have been there the whole time? To restart. To replenish.
Nearly seven months after my father died, my mom sends me a note. Ever since you all left, I have had a difficult time without your Dad. I guess I waited until all my duties were completed for Dad to grieve and now my life got so lonely.”
On the flight from San Francisco to Honolulu the day my father died, I took out my notebook and wrote, I don’t know what to do with my hands or my mind. I feel stuck here on this plane. He just turned 76. He’s eight years younger than his mother was when she died. I’m not ready for what comes next. What will happen to my mother? My son sat behind me on that flight. He watched me take out my notebook. He watched me write. Days later he would tell me, “When I saw you take out your notebook, I knew we were going to be ok.”
I write my mother back that afternoon and end my note by saying, You were the love of his life. I want to practice seeing you the way he did. You always brought him such happiness.
Grief is so many unexpected turns: a list of words, of yearning, of waking up every morning and opening a door he can’t figure out how to get through. It is hardpan soil and cloud forest, hiking sticks and shuffling. It is the naming of miracles and the unnaming of them. In this grief I’m trying to find a lightening, too. Something unexpected. A burning island drenched. A hoʻailona. A sign in the shape of a note from my mother. The aliveness of daughters. Bodies of water, and bodies in water. How before he could really talk my son made up names for the people he loved. I give names to everything: my father, his wife, his daughter. When I wrote my mother back there were the words and then the words I wanted her to hear—this is how to tuck our sadness into the pages, I was saying. There is the world we live in and the one we can feel underneath it. This is the spot where we converge.
Malia Collins is a Native Hawaiian writer and the State of Idaho’s 2019-2021 Writer-in-Residence. She grew up in Kailua, Oʻahu and has lived, worked, and traveled around the world. In June of 2022, she finally made her way back home to Hawaiʻi. She now lives in Honolulu with her husband and has two children away at college. For ten years she was a professor of English and Creative Writing at the College of Western Idaho and now works as a managing editor at the University of Hawaiʻi Press and teaches a writing class at Kapiʻolani Community College. Malia’s published short stories and essays in a number of literary magazines, has two children’s books, and is currently working on a collection of essays about Hawaiʻi. She loves open ocean swimming, hiking the trails across the islands, finding a spot to watch sunrise or sunset, and taking long walks with her dog, Honi. She also loves hearing and telling really spooky stories.
Photo by staff
