I miss Hawaii.

With every fiber of my being, I miss the ocean and the mountains, the forests and the lava deserts. I would give anything to be able to live in the Kona of my youth. It doesn’t exist now, if it ever really did.

I moved away from Hawaii to finally finish college in 1999 and I haven’t lived there since. I think about it every now and then. What would it take for me to live happily there? A good job that isn’t part of the tourist industry…hopefully teaching at a university and writing?

My mother tempted me with applications for Hawaiian Homelands, which my sisters have taken part of and I am glad they did. They have homes that they built with reasonable mortgages. They have children who can inherit the 99 year lease. I have no children and my husband would lose that home after I died so truly it’s a waste for me to take a spot from someone who has a family to share it with…. but that makes me angry! Why must I submit to grubbing for property so that I can live in my homeland?

These are always my thoughts as we consider where to live if we ever go back to America. I am part of the Hawaiian Diaspora, a bit by choice, a bit by socioeconomic circumstances.

I recently saw a facebook post from a high school friend traveling around Washington who met a Hawaiian who was living there and it made me think about how many there are of us living away from Hawaii. How many of us leave for better jobs, homes we can afford, better educational opportunities? When I was in high school, we went to several assemblies discussing the Hawaiian brain drain and that was in the 90s, but we have been draining Hawaii of Hawaiians for decades if not longer.

I have friends and family who live, work, breathe the Hawaii of today. Some are surviving. Just living like normal Americans. And there are those struggling against that. They are activists. They protest the TMT Telescope on Mauna Kea, the racial profiling of Hawaiians by non-Hawaiians in Hawaii, the slow and inevitable degradation of our culture and our original way of life, the acquisition of land by the rich and powerful, the tourism industry prostituting and destroying the dream of Hawaii.

I am not there with them. I am not even there with them in spirit because I feel defeated. Hawaiians have been fighting for themselves since the first time Captain Cook landed on the Big Island. My family lives there, and they seem happy enough. I just don’t know if that life is for me.

Living away from Hawaii, offers me a perspective that I need for my writing, the distance from place and memory and emotion.

When I started writing this, I wasn’t sure where I was going. It feels more like a rant hidden in a diary hidden in a blog. I guess maybe I still haven’t come to terms with the fact that I can’t really go home.