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Show Following Sea The following day I began to run again, resuming a habit that had dominated much of my life. I ran to the canoe club the evening I received the phone bill with all those calls to Athena, the woman he left me to be with and the one he would eventually marry; I ran along the Ala Wai canal when the divorce papers came and to Kapiolani Park as I moved out of our apartment and into a studio; I ran Ala Moana Beach Park the day that I began telling people and along Waikiki the morning I left the island for graduate school in Michigan. If I ran, I thought, to the point where sweat soaked my t-shirt and my lungs fought with ribs for air, then I would know I was still here. As a child, in Maloelap, I ran with my father along the neighborhood bike path after dinner. It was never planned. One moment I would be handing him wrenches while he worked beneath the belly of the car and the next, having grabbed the closest shoes, running toward the sinking sun. Our route would take us in and out of the matched sets of military quarters that spilled like monopoly pieces from the gates of Pearl Harbor. Soldiers and sailors, dressed in regulation white t-shirts and knit shorts, shared our evening route, the rhythmic clink of dog tags heard long before they overtook us on the path. I would trot happily beside my father and keep my eyes trained on the ground, negotiating the heaves in the asphalt where the roots from monkey pod trees breached the ground for air. These runs were easy, effortless, and sweet. Only looking back now do I 223 |