Color never seemed like this before, even though I’ve worked with color professionally for years. I just don’t ever remember it jumping out at me like this, and I’d think it was hallucinogenic drugs, but I’ve taken nothing. I’m not even drinking a piña colada or Tropical Itch. I wonder what it is that would make the world tip and slide, tilting color like a liquid rainbow, painting everything the deepest, brightest hue.

I’m smiling at an elderly Japanese man walking along the beach, stooped and pigeon-toed in his tight, wet, too small purple Speedo when it suddenly hits me. All this color, all this life. It’s joy. It’s hope. It’s peace.

I’ve got me back again.

I wait on the Outrigger Hotel’s steps for Kai to finish putting away the surfboards. The guys at the beach desk are closing up shop, too, taking down the umbrellas, stacking the lounge chairs, carefully counting and locking up the Maui Jim sunglasses.

The routine is always the same, and it’s comforting. I’m a stranger here, but life on the island has its own rhythm, much like life on the mainland.

The guys at the beach desk need to sell their suntan lotion and sunglasses, dependent on the commission. The beach boys—surf instructors like Kai—give lessons and hope there’ll be a tip. No one makes a lot of money. Everyone must be an ambassador of aloha.

The surf instructors say the things tourists want to hear. They pose for the photos, standing next to sunburned smiling women and kids, hands up in the “hang loose” sign with the massive soft-top surfboard between. They clap out-of-shape men on the back, tell them they’re riding waves now.

A cluster of girls in bikinis and little skirts are waiting for Kai when he comes back up from the hotel’s basement. He knows several of them, kisses them, and they stand around him, talking excitedly. He smiles, listening, and then reaches out to one of the girls, catches her straw beach bag before it falls, and adjusts it on her shoulder.

The same thing he does for me.

My heart kind of falters. The touch means nothing. He’s not interested in the girls. He knows I’m sitting here in the shade, watching. But still.

Still.

I’m forty. They’re twenty-something. Maybe right now I’m relatively unlined, but how long can this last? How long can I compete with much younger women?

“How does this end?” I ask Kai later, turning onto my stomach to kiss his chest, right above his heart. I wish I were a bigger part of his heart, wish that really great sex meant eternal happiness and not just a temporary release. Because I don’t want just a temporary release. I still want true love and romance.

True love.