Today I am leaving the room painted entirely, including the ceiling, deep but bright blue. It was a short sojourn in a house in Enchanted Lakes neighborhood of Kailua. Despite the brevity, this past month has been monumental in my life and my Hawaiian journey. I spent almost every day in this room, rarely leaving. The question of who I am, a question that has returned time and again throughout my life struck powerfully at the beginning, shortly after my birthday. I had to travel to the open source of pain before coming back. In my imagination there were fields I did not understand, songs of the afternoon I always carry, the most pronounced darkness of the morning light, time of my body swimming towards destruction of desire and life, and me lost inside the mountain on my journey. The nocturnal visitor of my life, depression, came with a vengeance, obscuring the vision and undermining summer progress. Despair, an emotion of absurdity and lack of meaning, once again settled in, questioning my existential assignment as an island exile. But this time, in the aqua room, it would be different.
I heard the whispers of salvation coming from love. I was ready to pass through the threshold of pain to the other side, letting the past go. Almost beaten by the darkness, changes of faith and wavering heart in my self-imposed cocoon, this time I wanted to come out. Love taught me that there can be tenacity in the footsteps of my life, resilience, that I can adapt and survive in the moment despite sending shallow roots in every direction in the past in search of an ever elusive sense of me. As the sea breeze from the ocean at the cliff enveloping the body, so the blue room was enveloping my singular and alone self. But I did not jump into the abyss of the self. I decided to reveal the blockages in my soul, to expose the ugliness of self-pity. Instants of opening would suffer setbacks though and sometimes I would crawl back into the pain. But the fire inside was already roused and I wanted to come out of the darkness in a brazen spiritual return of affirmation of life and love, leaving the murky waters behind.
And once the decision was made, the waters and the aqua room started releasing me, paths of closure and horizons of endless escapes from the self illuminated began to be discarded. I decided to see a psychologist and two weeks later to fill a prescription for antidepressants, for the first time in my life so plagued by the intermittent shadow of depression for years. I am ready to walk into the Hawaiian sunshine again as I depart for my next residence, but this time the departure is an arrival. For I am finally arriving to where I was always going, with battle wounds to be left behind and with healing of love to be embraced. I am arriving to the opening of light and of my soul, and as that is happening, I can finally start living.