celeste_noelani | Unpack This

Originally posted by

http://www.runningnekkid.com/content/unpack

I'm early for my appointment so I sit in the waiting room. Usually I wait in the first floor lobby, alternately checking my phone and people watching until it's time to go upstairs for my session. I also hang back from the bank of elevators, waiting to catch an empty one. It's a busy building so I'm hardly ever successful, but still. I try.

Today, however, is different. I strode right up to the elevators and made my way up to the seventh floor. I sat in the small waiting room chair and didn't even feel the usual irritable burn of pre-therapy anxiety. Today I am aware of an almost-excitement and realize I feel ready.

I am ready to turn this corner, not just in therapy, but inside my entire life.

For the past few years, my sessions have revolved around the deep cultural grieving of no longer being of Hawaiʻi in the way I assumed I would always be when I was a child. Living in Seattle is deeply conflicting to me, both an enormous privilege and a difficult burden. It's possible, of course, to be a Hawaiian / Chamorro Pacific Islander living in this incredibly white city. After all, I do actually live here. But it takes the kind of stamina I never considered when I was a young hapa girl dreaming of living somewhere other than my rock in the middle of the ocean.

Discussing this stamina, and my need for it, has been an endless question mark inside my twice weekly therapy appointments, a struggle I circle again and again without really committing to. I mean, we talk about it, of course. But I skirt and flounce and back away from the deep, foundational delving I've done with other topics.

More universal topics, I tell myself. More...understandable, I guess, to my therapist who specializes in postpartum depression, pregnancy loss, grieving.

But I have a lot to talk about today, my first session after returning from a week spent cradled in one branch of my ancestral tree. My most formative branch, as it were, and nestled deep in the aloha of my most formative relations. My people, if I'm being really honest.

It is, as it turns out, completely possible to go back home, if you're willing to allow that home to change as much as you have changed in the time you spent away from it.

And being home has just brought into sharper focus all of the away from home I do every day up here in Seattle. All of the work I have had to do to find and then retain my self in this city that has afforded me a rich, lustrous life that I am in no hurry to leave behind. Thoughts I'd brought to dozens of previous therapy sessions are more formed, backed by more conviction or observation earned while on my short island vacation.

Before this trip it had been ten years since I last went home in any meaningful way, not counting the single day I spent on my childhood Oʻahu before flying to Hilo for a wedding. The last time I was home it was 2006 and it was for a funeral. My younger cousin, a deeply darling childhood playmate, was being laid to rest and we flew home in a hurry. But my hurry wasn't hurried enough, of course. I hadn't known my cousin as a man. As a father. He hadn't known me except for the memories we shared of days spent laughing in his grandparents' living room. Those were good memories, of course. Those were good times. But I let him go, let everyone go, when I left my islands.

I hadn't even seen my closest relations, the Nanakuli McLeans on that visit. They didn't come to Kanani's funeral. Those cousins, first cousins, once so close we were almost raised as siblings, hadn't been seen for over twenty years. Twenty. I remember doing everything with them once upon a time, when our fathers were strong and alive and almost the same person with their quick humor and enormous spirits. But then our dads were gone from us, and we all became gone from one another.

Decades of absence, of longing, of feeling adrift with no sense of how to find moorage. Of feeling displaced while knowing I chose this displacement. Keep choosing it, in fact, again and again with the roots I laid down here in the city I both ecstatically and begrudgingly I call home.

But I can't blame Seattle, regardless of her whiteness, for my personal detachment from my homeland. From my people. It's complicated, of course, not just my reasons for leaving, but my reasons for staying away. For all of us to drift apart, the enormous Maunupau ʻOhana, scattering like leaves until those together days seemed bygone long before I moved away.

Now I wait in my therapist's office. I have been back in Seattle for two days, having come home from home and feeling all over the importance of these layers of truth. I am loose. I am relaxed. My skin is nearly the color I remember myself being before I moved to the Northwest. But I am still light, still fair when compared to my family. This is complicated for me, too, just like leaving. Just like staying away.

I hear the door to my therapist's office open. She steps into the waiting room and beckons me with a welcoming smile. I smile back, grateful for this time to sit and sift through the thoughts I've brought back with me, like the sand clinging to the bottom of a suitcase still sprawled on my living room floor. I sit on her chaise, sinking into the soft, familiar cushions. I open my mouth and out tumble the words of travel and adventure. And then, after that, the deep knots of truth I have come here to unfurl.