In Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, an author with whom I have spent many years in my mind considering themes of identity and emigration, one of the main characters is brought back to her past by a bowler hat. An object of affection between her and an old lover, the hat returns to her life. She looks in the mirror, considers its trajectory, and is “amazed at the number of years she had spent pursuing one lost moment”. This sentence from the novel has stayed with me since I read it. For I too have pursued recreation of singular moments inspired by an object. In my case not a material one, but an interplay of light, the most spectacular Hawaiian rainbow.
I have kept a printed picture of a rainbow over Hanalei Bay from my first visit to Hawaii 15 years ago. I don’t know if I seek the moment of that specific one because of the archival evidence or an amalgam of feelings from that first encounter with the islands but I know that ever since then I was falling in love with Hawaii and that my returns were all seeking that feeling of splendor. Sabina’s hat was a motif returning, as in a musical composition, each time with a different meaning. New meanings would coexist with former ones, enriching the experience. The same can be said for my rainbows. Each time a new appears, I remember the previous ones and the feelings I had while looking at them. I remember the company, and awe of belief.
I will never tire of rainbows, no matter how commercialized the image is from apparel to print. Because when one is in Hawaii, and it’s drizzling, and the sun is peeking from behind the clouds over the lush mountain range and everything is illuminated and a rainbow appears, nothing else, nowhere else can compare to the feeling of elation. After that first visit many years ago, I was returning to beautiful Santa Cruz mountains, to a house in the redwood forest. But I felt forlorn, and not in a way one always feels when a vacation has come to an end. I felt like one who leaves a house of the beloved, not knowing when she will be able to return. I did not for 10 years, and when I moved here to live, rainbows of feeling only Hawaii can hold welcomed me with hope.
I have been in love with Hawaii for a long time now. But me remembering that initial moment of the rainbow encounter does not hold the sadness Sabina felt towards the bowler hat. The hat had many stories, a rich melody of experiences but no new lover would surpass the first man with whom she made love and looked at the mirror wearing it. Each time a rainbow appears in my life, it adds to the richness of my life story but is also an eternal present of beauty. And what I did not expect at all, was the feeling of boundless love I feel when I point to a rainbow and its power to the one I have fallen in love with. Because after all, falling in love for the first time in the rainbow state is truly magnificent, and only a picture of my heart’s mind is needed to see that.