If you don’t know what (or where) you’re looking at, if you’ve never been to this locus of the planet (Maui), then you might miss it in the relatively low-rez photo above.

The ocean, that is.

There. Can you see it, now that I’ve alluded to it? It’s that fainter line of blue right in the middle, the patch just above the trees. And if you sweep your glance left, you’ll run into a darker patch and that’s the Kahakuloa headlands. Had it been a slightly less hazy afternoon, the sharp horizon would have been visible.

One is never far from the ocean, anywhere on any Hawaiian island. It determines the state of being of any organism here, sentient or otherwise.

I am still in a state of remembering. Holidays do that to me, as it must to most anyone, I suppose. One remembers the dead, mostly. Although the living come to mind as well, perhaps even more starkly. Like N, for example, who I was thinking of during the drive down. Afflicted with existential anxiety from a young age, now as an adult in his late 20s he has a tenuous grasp on being.

I wish he will remain so; “being,” that is. I do not wish for him a continuation of his fraught condition. I should call him—our common ocean compels it. Though he grew up near the coast of California once upon a time, he’s not so far from the Pacific these days, in Stockton. I should call him.

I will.