Chapter 14 Akemi
Akemi
Life at home had fallen into an easy rhythm. Akemi rose in time to watch the sunrise over the ocean, and then she spent her morning hours working online.
She had a massive archive of photos and videos from her travels.
Instead of scrambling to post things when she was on the move, she waited until she was based somewhere for a while and batch created all of her videos and guides.
That took up most of her time, though she also gave a solid hour most days to emails: tourism boards, brand deals, other creators and longtime friends checking in about upcoming plans; there was always a lot to juggle.
Akemi loved the life that she had created, but work was still work. It was gratifying to spend such a long stretch of time with her family; they’d never really seen how many hours she put into her work each week.
Now they were starting to show more curiosity about it all. Her mom liked to watch over her shoulder as she pieced videos together and added captions, and she and her sisters talked late into the night about her adventures.
There was still plenty of time to get out and enjoy the island, too.
And because there was so little separation between her life and her work, every adventure was an opportunity to create more content.
Whenever she hiked to a waterfall with old friends or spent a few hours at the beach with family, she surreptitiously recorded bits and pieces of her day to make into Hawaii compilations down the road.
Akemi couldn’t imagine working a normal nine to five… but at the same time, she sometimes wondered if she’d lost some degree of authentic presence in her life to that constant compulsion to create content. She hardly ever left her devices behind to just enjoy the day.
Even when she did leave her phone at home – and she sometimes did, when she was riding along with one of her sisters and wanted to be fully present with her family – her mind swarmed with a dozen different things.
She was rich in experiences and hopes and plans… and yet all of those things continuously pulled her out of the present moment.
And that was where things got really meta, because even as she sat thinking about her struggles with technology, a part of her brain was putting together a monologue on the topic for her next video.
Maybe there was no remedy to it, she reflected. Maybe it was just the price she paid for packing a lifetime’s worth of adventures into each year.
Claire stumbled into the kitchen half awake and pulled open the drawer where she kept her matcha – then jumped back and slammed it shut.
“I hate it here!” she burst out.
“Well.” Akemi closed her laptop. “Good morning to you too.”
“Sorry.” Claire swiped a palm over her eyes. “I didn’t see you sitting there.”
“What are you shouting about?” Anne hissed as she came into the kitchen.
Claire turned on her mother. “There are roaches in the drawers!”
“Keep your voice down! The guests are sleeping.”
“That’s all you care about anymore!”
“We need money to eat, Claire. And these early reviews will determine whether or not we get more people renting rooms this summer. So yes, that’s what I care about. Providing for you, and for your brother.”
“Whatever.”
“What is going on with you?”
“Nothing!” Claire nearly shouted the word.
Anne threw her hands up in frustration and walked out of the room.
“Okay, she’s gone,” Akemi whispered conspiratorally. “What’s going on with you?”
Claire rolled her eyes. “I just hate it here.”
“Yes,” Akemi said wryly, “this ocean-view house in Hawaii is truly hell on Earth.”
“I’m serious,” Claire said, but Akemi could see her fighting back a smile.
“Me too. This place is the worst. Sunshine every day? Birdsong? Blue skies? Like, get over yourself, am I right? What a try-hard.”
“Exactly.” She was smiling openly now. “The sun is too sunny.”
“Totally. No one likes it here. They’re all just pretending.”
Claire sighed, and her smile fell away.
“Come on. Spill. What’s going on?”
“I haven’t heard from my boyfriend in like a week.
I don’t even know if he is my boyfriend.
Last time we talked, I was telling him I don’t know if I’ll make it back to the mainland in time to start school, and he was like, ‘Well I don’t think either of us is ready for a serious long-distance relationship,’ but, like, we’re already in a relationship? !”
“And since then he’s just been avoiding you?”
“I mean, he’s been busy. But… yeah, seems like it.” Claire made a sound of pure frustration. “Why can’t he just come out and say what he’s thinking?”
“It sort of sounds like he did.”
Claire made another inarticulate noise and drooped dramatically onto the kitchen island.
Akemi stood and stretched. “We need a beach day.”
“No way. Didn’t we just establish that the sun is too sunny?”
“I’ll take you to the shadiest beach on the island.”
“Literally shady or, like, sketchy shady?”
“Mostly the former,” she teased. “It’s a tiny beach, but it’s way out of the way. Hardly anybody knows it’s there.”
“Yeah, okay. That sounds cool.”
“Can I come?” Pete popped up from the couch in the front room.
Claire jumped back in surprise.
“What?” he demanded.
“How long have you been there?”
“I dunno, like an hour?”
“Just lying there?”
“Can I come to the beach or what?”
Claire gave Akemi a pleading look, but the hope in Pete’s eyes won out.
“I don’t see why not. Run and ask your mom if she wants to come too.”
“That’s it,” Claire said as Pete thundered up the stairs. “I’m out.”
“No way I’m leaving you here to languish indoors and wait for a text to come through.”
Claire gave her a dirty look, and Akemi laughed.
“Glare at me all you want, but we’re getting you out of doors. There’s more to life than your viola player, I promise.”
Claire stuck her tongue out at her, but there was a playfulness to it.
“Go get changed.”
“Sir yes sir!” She saluted and ran up the stairs.
Akemi was gathering her things to put them away when a goodnight text came in from Lorenzo.
He was twelve hours ahead of her, so they mostly spoke at the beginning or end of each day.
She sent him pictures of the golden ocean sunrise that she woke up to each morning, and he replied with pictures of the sun setting over the Arno or a snapshot of the vista he had taken his tour group to that day.
She had tagged along with him to work almost every day of her short trip to Tuscany – easily done, given that he worked as a tour guide in one of the most beautiful places in the world.
She missed him. More than she had thought that she would. More than she had ever missed anyone she’d met in her travels.
Akemi had fallen in love a number of times.
Some of those travel romances had lasted months or years…
but each time the relationship ended, she’d moved on quickly.
She had wondered if she even had the capacity to be in a lasting relationship, or if she was too flighty.
She’d been quickly approaching middle age without ever coming anywhere close to marriage or motherhood, and she had just about accepted that neither one was in the cards for her.
And then she met Lorenzo. In Pualena, of all places.
They’d met in her own family home, in fact. He’d been renting Halia’s old bedroom. It was after Kimo’s heart attack, and her parents had taken in a short-term boarder to bring some money in while he recuperated.
Lorenzo was there to spend time with his daughter, Rory King. She was an adorable little six year old with her father’s eyes and a sun-bright smile. He spent every moment he could with her – and when she went back to her mother, he’d looked suddenly lost and adrift.
And so Akemi had swooped in. She showed him the local trails and her favorite spots to eat. They swam with wild dolphins, cooked together, and stayed up late into the night talking.
Things had escalated quickly. Just another travel romance, she told herself, but even from the beginning there was something different about her connection with Lorenzo. A depth that had been missing from her other relationships.
She was nearly forty, and she’d never been in a serious relationship. This one felt serious, but they lived on separate continents. And beyond the more practical hurdles, Akemi wondered if she was too old to change.
Was there room in her life for a man? For a true partner?
She wasn’t sure.
There was a cord connecting them still, and not only because she was carrying his child. The daily texts felt both necessary and insufficient. She so wanted to sit with him, to just be in the same place as him.
She craved his presence, and that was a new experience for her.
“Ready!” Claire sang, jogging into the kitchen. “What are you doing? Where’s your bathing suit?”
“Sorry.” Akemi wrinkled her nose and grinned at her niece. “Five minutes.”
She piled into the car with Anne and her kids, and they drove up to Hilo.
Past the vast green lawns and sheltered pools where crowds congregated, down a dirt road and then a long walk past the parking lot, there was a tiny beach where Akemi and her sisters had spent countless hours growing up.
She took snippets of video along the way, because even getting there was gorgeous. A narrow trail took them between the ocean and the freshwater pools that seeped up through the rock, twisting between outcroppings of volcanic rock and around fallen trees.
They had to wade through fresh water at one point, cold and crystal clear, before climbing a small hill of lava rock to reach the hidden beach.
Tall ironwood trees sheltered the lagoon, making it easy to drift between sunshine and shade as needed. Pete splashed into the deepest part of the lagoon while Claire and Anne strung up a pair of hammocks in the shade.
Akemi went straight to a tiny island out in the middle of the water. She laid her beach towel on the warm black lava rock and sprawled out like a sea star, letting the sunshine soak into her skin. There was a faint movement low in her belly as her baby stretched and turned.
The late morning sun was delicious, and Akemi drifted into a pleasant state somewhere between sleeping and waking. She floated free from worry or rumination, into the kind of peace that she only ever found when she dozed in the sun by the sea.
A chipper voice startled her from her meditation.
“Where to next?”
Akemi opened her eyes to see Claire emerge like a mermaid from the lagoon, her dark red hair streaming water. She pulled herself up onto the sun-warmed rocks beside her aunt, looking at her expectantly.
Akemi blinked, still in a sun-soaked daze.
“Today?” she asked groggily. “Or…?”
“For you. Where’s your next job? Where are you flying to?”
“Oh.” Akemi rubbed her eyes and tried to remember. “Albania, I think.”
“You don’t even know which country you’re going to?”
“I’m going to North Macedonia too, but I think Albania’s first.”
She had landed these deals the year before. It was exciting at the time, pitching ideas to local tourism boards and finding ways to stay in Europe for free past the ninety-day Schengen limit.
Now, though… it just felt like work.
“Maybe Italy after that,” she said drowsily, though there were no tickets booked.
That’s news to me, the more analytical part of her mind said tartly.
Akemi just rolled over onto one side, letting the sun soak into her back.
Claire drifted back across the lagoon to join her mother in the shade. The quiet, peaceful sound of their conversation floated across the water, and Akemi let the pleasant sound of familiar voices wash over her without listening to the words.
Content and present, she drifted back into a sun-soaked siesta.