Hawaii Is (Not) For Lovers

"Daddy, I need you to take me to the airport now," I said.

Tears streamed down my face as I looked into my dad’s eyes, unable to match his gaze, but unwavering in my demand. The last time I approached him with a suitcase in hand was a decade earlier when at 10 years old, I announced plans to live out a version of Bridge to Terabithia in the woods at the end of our street.

“You’ve got this, honey,” my dad encouraged without prying. “Whatever is going on, you’ve got this.” I wasn’t so sure.

I was 19 when I met The Sailor. He was obnoxious, full of himself the way only a handsome Navy serviceman just coming into his own can be, and he knocked me off my feet. I was a self-proclaimed book nerd blossoming into a confident, assertive woman who just suffered her first heartbreak. The sting of the breakup with my high school sweetheart left me ready to break the heart of the next unsuspecting boy who caught my eye.

My resolve to remain immune to the charms of The Sailor slipped away with each Malibu Bay Breeze I drank that first night on the dance floor. By the time we spilled onto the street in the glare of the sunrise, I was infatuated.

We spent the year he was stationed at the Saratoga Springs Naval Base pretending we knew what it meant to be adults. He lived with a group of Navy sailors in a two-story house overlooking a beautiful lake; I lived at home with my parents and siblings. While he spent his days studying nuclear engineering, I completed my associate's degree and worked full-time managing an office, waiting tables, and for real life to begin.

Together, we laid hand-in-hand outside the lake house, the grass on our backs staring up at fireflies as they danced above us in the night sky. We talked about his childhood growing up with a single mom in a tiny town in Middle-of-Nowhere, Illinois, and how I'd never traveled much beyond my hometown in Upstate New York.

We drove across the snowy terrain of New York along Interstate 90, passing through Amish country in Pennsylvania, seeing the city lights of Cleveland, Akron, Dayton, and Indianapolis until we got lost in the never-ending corn fields of Illinois. He brought me to meet his family, and I immediately fell in love with this new landscape promising a glimpse into a life just starting to bloom. Something about the military and young love accelerates the desire to settle down, to be responsible, and we fell into those roles seamlessly like good soldiers.

We returned to New York; me to my family home and him to the Naval base ready to depart for his next assignment in Pearl Harbor, prepared to give the distance a try.

As our phone bills swelled, so did my feeling that there was more world out there beyond the confines of stability in New York. I felt suffocated by the thought of staying the course I’d carefully laid out; pursuing my bachelor’s degree and living like a crayon that never strayed beyond the lines of a coloring book page.

On one of our late-night calls, The Sailor remarked, “We could get married.”

I clung to this sentiment like a life raft feeling a wedding would bridge the distance our current circumstances put between us. I was naive enough to think marriage was the answer to the questions I had about who I was and where I belonged, completely oblivious to the fact I was allowing someone else to chart the course.

I put dreams of finishing my degree in New York on hold to fit myself into The Sailor’s plans. In November, I flew to Honolulu alone for my first Thanksgiving away from family, and first visit to see The Sailor since we parted ways earlier in the year.

We ate our non-traditional Thanksgiving feast of fresh calamari fried to perfection and just-caught Opakapaka fish at the infamous Duke’s Waikiki. With our stomachs full and fingers interlaced, we walked along the beach from Duke’s to my hotel.

Though wedding plans were already as underway as a submarine, The Sailor formally dropped to one knee under the moonlight with the Pacific Ocean as the backdrop and asked, “Will you marry me?”

He slipped a simple marquise diamond ring on my sunburnt finger, and through tears I managed to answer, “Of course!” I didn’t let the fact I had already paid deposits for our ceremony and reception spoil the act of the proposal.

I no longer felt like a charlatan with a diamond on my ring finger. What initially felt like an obtuse fantasy, playing the part of bride rather than someone’s soon-to-be wife, finally felt real and I spent the next six months in planning mode.

I kept The Sailor apprised of the wedding planning process, never catching onto the fracture penetrating our façade on those transoceanic phone calls.

In May, I answered a call informing him I’d just placed our wedding invitations in the mail. I expected him to match my enthusiasm. Instead, he croaked out the words, “I can’t do this. I can’t marry you,” and my world splintered open.

Dizzy and nauseous, I couldn’t comprehend the magnitude and truth of what The Sailor just said. Surely, I misheard. Verizon had to be to blame for the bad connection.

The call ended, along with all my rational thought.

“But I just mailed our invitations,” I thought to myself. “It’s too late to back out.” I began to spiral, further compounding the vertigo I couldn’t escape as I imagined receiving responses from well-meaning family and friends. I had to get ahead of the mail. The idea of opening pristine vellum cards in elaborate script from oblivious respondents selecting chicken or beef hit like the pain of a thousand tiny paper cuts.

“He can’t do this?” I questioned. “I can’t do this,” I thought, envisioning the turbulence to come.

I haphazardly packed my suitcase, still adorned with the HNL baggage tag from my last trip and thought about the credit card I took out specifically to pay for the wedding deposits. I’d figure out how to pay it off later. Now, my only thought was having enough left on the card to get me from New York to Hawaii.

I was silent in my spiral on the ride to the airport. I hugged my dad and watched, paralyzed, as he drove away from the departure lane. "This is it," I thought to myself as I walked through the security line, boarding pass in hand. "I'm on my own."

I boarded the first leg of my last-minute flight, squeezed in a middle seat between two passengers whose demeanors were the opposite of my morose devastation. Ten hours after demanding a ride to the airport, I landed in LAX and gathered the last bit of strength I had to pick up my phone and dial The Sailor's number. "I need you to be at the airport in 8 hours."

Dumbfounded, The Sailor muttered, "What? I don't understand."

"I am at LAX. I’ll be in Honolulu in 8 hours, and I need you to pick me up at the airport. If you’re going to end this, you’re going to end it to my face. I’ll see you in 8 hours." I hung up my phone and immediately turned it off, knowing my resolve depended on not hearing anything The Sailor might say to convince me otherwise.

In the span of 48 hours, my life as I knew turned upside down, stretched across states, time zones, and an ocean as it brought me face-to-face with the person responsible for upending it first in the most beautiful and now the most heartrending ways.

"This is harder than I thought. I don't want to end this, I just...don't want to get married. We're so young and things are different here," he said.

In that moment, jetlagged and standing in front of The Sailor begging him to look me in the eye and tell me this was really the end, I was the girl on the night we met, and I could see the chasm that not only the distance, but our separate life experiences had caused.

In trying to live outside the lines, I’d merely turned the page and found myself constricted by the decisions of the picture someone else had drawn for me.

Reclaiming the resolve of the girl who was ready to break the next unsuspecting heart the night we met, I took back control of the plans. I would not be the long-distance girlfriend, suspending my life while The Sailor saw the world and lived the life he planned with only a fleeting thought of me when he was ready to settle down.

“You need to call everyone I just mailed our invitations to and explain to them the wedding is off,” I said. The physical reminders of “the wedding that wasn’t” showing up in my mailbox seemed unfathomable, and I needed The Sailor to do his part to intercept the damage.

I slid off the ring that barely left a visible imprint and gave it back to The Sailor. The sharp edges of the diamond and the reflection of the facets reminded me there is beauty in hardness. A diamond must undergo immense pressure to become something beautiful, and there were so many facets to the girl I was when I met The Sailor and the woman I became standing in front of him in our undoing.

I exited the house he shared with his fellow Navy sailors (not unlike the house in Saratoga where our story began) setting off toward my hotel. I found myself exploring the island solo, relishing the beauty and culture I missed when I was previously too caught up in the haze of a relationship.

Though I was surrounded by other visitors seemingly coupled up, I stood alone in the sunlight of the island that unwittingly became the catalyst for independence. I channeled the Hawaiian Goddess Hi’iaka, a healing deity known for warning sailors of oncoming storms and braced myself for what was to come.

At just 21, I was still learning who I was, what I wanted out of life, finally beginning to see the world. I was hopelessly heartbroken but filled with a new determination. I knew this experience was breaking me, but I was on the threshold of becoming who I was meant to be.

Within months of my return flight home, I relocated unencumbered to Nashville, Ten. for a year, determined not to compromise my hard-fought independence, and ready to experience life on my terms.

I met my now-husband at the job I took the day I returned to New York. On a pontoon boat in the middle of Otsego Lake four years into our relationship, I commented, “This would be a great place to propose if you ever planned to do it.” When I turned around, he was already down on one knee, ring in hand.

Now at 42, my meant to be looks different than I imagined it would when I was 21. Last fall I sat in the audience as my fiercely independent 9-year-old daughter took to the stage in the lead role of Matilda The Musical, belting out the line, “Nobody but me is gonna change my story!”

I see in her glimmers of the girl I discovered on the island 21 years earlier. I see how my long-ago heartbreak shaped the autonomy I carry with me as I navigate raising my girl and her brother. It took me years to learn that I am in control of my story, and I hope my daughter never waivers from the notion she so boldly proclaimed to the packed theater.

Someday, she can come to me and say, “Mommy, I need you to take me to the airport now.”

I will be there, no questions asked.