After a year and a half of trying to move on from the what-ifs, the tides have pulled Alexandra Rivera and Zachariah Kim back together again.
*****
In the h...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
With the sun just barely cresting above the townhouses, I tapped my hand against the door and waited for Anthony. He held the door open for me but I shook my head and gestured for him to come outside.
"Let's go eat at our spot," I said, stepping back.
My brother is a gentle soul that understands his family with the utmost care, so it took no hesitation for him to grab his keys from the hook by the door, locking the house behind him. He slid his feet into his navy blue slippers and grabbed the bags from me to carry them over.
At the center of our neighborhood was a pavilion that had an area connected to it with all of the mailboxes. Next to both was a patch of grass sprinkled with benches around the perimeter and a few playground fixtures that had long rusted over to the point that nobody used them anymore.
When Anthony and I were younger, we spent all of our afternoons playing there. Once upon a time, it had been the social hub of our little cluster of houses, and some of the first friendships I ever built were made at that covered slab of concrete.
Eventually, as all things golden only in essence, our time playing there ended and it soon resembled a shrine of our childhood. Every time I drove past it, I was reminded of how long it'd been since I last lived without a single care in the world.
My brother and I found ourselves going out there during our middle and high school years to look up at the stars, wondering if it was possible to become one ourselves.
Anthony dropped the food down the dead center of the covered portion of the pavilion and both of us followed. Crossing our legs and digging into the plastic bags, I pulled out the containers of lau lau, lomi salmon, poi (which I hated but my brother loved), and chicken long rice. If there was any scent I could use to describe Hawai'i in a nutshell, it'd be sea salt and the food laid out in front of us.
"What's the special occasion?" he asked before slurping a string of long rice.
"Does it only have to be a special occasion for me to come over with food?"
"We both know the most effective tool of bribery is food. And with this kind of food," he said, gesturing at the Hawaiian spread, "I know something is on your mind."
He spoke nothing but the truth and it filled my heart with a comforting warmth.
"Just thinking about a lot of stuff I guess." I shrugged. "Nothing and everything."
Anthony removed the small piece of fish from my lau lau and exchanged it for one of his pieces of meat. "How's that therapy thing you started?"
I told him a couple of weeks ago about how I started a pen pal therapy program and had been exchanging letters with a guy from Seattle named Pablo. It was unusual at first to open up to a stranger about thoughts that mangled like a web in my mind, but something about the vulnerability made for a cathartic experience.
