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“What the hell?”
“I don’t know, I felt like this leaf needed to do something.”
“And hitting me was the answer.” He looks annoyed and I feel as if all is right with the world again.
We walk along and I shoot the landscape. I adjust and try to learn the camera. My first couple of shots suck but then I find a groove. He sits down on a rock and waits for me. Not impatiently but like an enjoying the moment way.
“This flower is broken.” I point at some wildflowers on the side of the trail.
“Someone must have tromped on it or something.”
I rustle the flowers in front of me, the whole bunch of them. “No. I mean they’re all broken. Like they lost half their petals. All perfectly split in half.”
He stands up and walks over to look. It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen, they’re in full half bloom.
“Oh, that’s the naupaka flower. The other half is down on the beach.” He walks away as if that makes any kind of sense.
“What the hell?” I run after him and we walk through a field of them.
“Legend has it that naupaka fell in love with Kauʻi, a fisherman. They couldn’t be together. The flower divided so that the one who had to live in the mountains wouldn’t have to be without the other one and same on the beach.”
“I can walk down there and find the other half of these flowers?”
“Probably not specifically that flower. But yes. They bloom the opposite half and so if you want a whole ass unbroken flower, we have to take one from here and unite to be complete.”
I take about a thousand pictures then pick about ten of them. I want ten of them to be whole.
“Let’s go to the beach.” I turn around.
“You are rather impatient.”
“I call it immediately curious. And it’s too sweet of a story not to be fixed.”
“Fixed?”
“They all need to be reunited.”
“We’re not doing that.”
“You will,” I say.
“No I won’t.”
I pretend to dial up a phone and put it to my ear. “Hello, Birdie, it was all a lie.”
“Fine, you’re immediately curious. You could have played that card for just about anything, and you’re doing it to unite a flower?”
“Seems important.”
He rolls his gorgeous dark brown eyes at me and I know I’ve won. He turns around and we start back to the car.
He asks, “I’m immediately curious, do you have a trust fund?”
“Now you want to marry me for my money? I can make it easy and give you my password to Money App where my 401k is still sitting.”
He laughs louder than he should, not realizing I’m totally serious.
“No. I’ve got plenty. Sometimes I don’t know if using the trust to finance a career they hate is the reason I want it. Like it has nothing to do with the actual money. Backhandedly fucking over the good boy I’m supposed to be.”
