This is the first time thoughts of Fiji have ever framed themselves so completely and ordered themselves so neatly in my mind. I was trying to sleep. My eyes closed and Fiji came back.
It's been two years to the day that I've returned from Fiji, dying to get back to American soil and wishing that I'd never gone in the first place. I hardly even remembered what I'd brought back from the island: a fiji rugby pencil case that I gave to Ted, a pair of black pearl earrings for my mother, and a black wooden bowl carved from a solid piece of wood for my dad. And rocks. lots and lots of rocks. So many of the black jagged kind that were pulled up from the ocean floor and none of the tame kind that washed up from the ocean onto the beaches of the resort in the town between Suva and Nadi.

This is the first time I've thought about the island of Fiji. The first time memories of the boat have come to me without me first going to them. I remember so much of my first impressions of the island, the warm heat that startled me coming out of the airport at 5AM, the bumpy, jarring ride from the Suva airport to the city center. The hill on which the motel 6 was perched and the Korean restaurant halfway down the hill, a 5 minute walk past the mitsubishi car dealership. It was the second arrival that I don't remember as well, the one after 6 exhaustive weeks aboard the Kilo.

I remember the landsickness and its ever so slight worsening as the Kilo came to a stop at the docks. I remember running ashore to check into the Holiday Inn in Suva, the only sealed hotel in Suva itself. The first shower in over a month where the shower didn't move and the soap need not be pinned down. The dinner that night (and the nights after that) were fabulous. The real egg ceasar and some other dish that was nowhere near as memorable as the ceasar, the smoky, oaky, hearty smell of the wine cork. I remember the malibu and pineapple, the Midori sours, the Jonny Walker black on rocks, the drunken gyrating of thirty of us to Chumbawumba. The morning after at 7:30am hailing a taxi for King's Wharf, clearing the boat and loading shipping container(s) and boxing things still unboxed from the day before. My anger at having been the only one who showed up at 7:30 so I stole away with Ted Kane to the Fiji National Museum where I nearly bought a ceremonial cannibal's fork.

And I remember the pineapples. The tuna sashimi, the roti and the Korean food. The waterfront park with the hustlers and the internet cafes. I stole away to the internet cafes as much as possible that week. The burn of love made me find as much contact as much as possible- that week, I went to as many internet cafes as possible hoping for a brief overlap of time where I could talk to him. Finding out I'd won a scholarship while being some 10 thousand miles away. The hundreds of stores that I went into, seemingly every store in downtown Suva only to really find nothing unique; nothing Fijian, and nothing worth taking home.

The drive from Suva to Nadi, in a rented SUV and the stop in a resort called "hideaway resort" with a makeshift rocky beach, a pool, volleyball courts and bures as "rooms." I can't remember what I ate that night there, nor the morning after, either. Getting back into the car for the several hour drive to Nadi, stopping in a town more desolate than the airport itself and then deciding the airport was really the best place to go. Spending hour upon hour in the airport getting bored with nothing left to do but eat airport food, waiting waiting waiting to go home and be reuinted in New York and in love.

There is something so appealing right now about Stamford and the Superdome.