Kawai Strong Washburn

"What do you think?" I ask her.
"I don't think you would," she says.
Sadness rings through me, sudden and clear. I ask her if she really believes that, and she says of course she does, that she's believed it since she was young, at Kehana, invisible, she says.
"Oh, Kaui," I say. "It's not like that at all. Of course we'd miss you."
She keeps her eyes away from me, looking at the floor or the wall. One arm crossed over her chest and grabbing the other shoulder. She mm-hmms my answer, softly.
"Did you ever think," she says, "maybe he wasn't what you thought he was?"...
I shrug. "He was special," I say. "Don't you think so?"
She doesn't answer. After a few quiet breaths, she leaves the doorway.

"Babe," he says again. As if we'd never missed each other all this time. "I gotta show you something."
I want to speak but say nothing. I step closer to him. His hand grasps my arm just above the elbow and pulls me into the kalo - and when my forehead touches the leaves I feel it...
Where I touch the leaves and stalks, I feel a thousand voices, chanting. Yes. I grasp the stalks, I bury my face with Augie. The chanting and the singing. I know the language even if this is the first time I hear it this way, a language of righteousness and cycles, giving and taking, aloha in the rawest form. Pure love. The chant grows in numbers, the way talk at a large gathering of people shifts from individual conversations into a babbling hum, so that what I'm touching now is more than voices, more than a chant, it's a hum of energy, and I can feel the hum extending into everything around us..."
Auguie's rough hand pulls me back from the leaves. There he is, examining me, his eyes gentle and full, the way they used to be. All of him is there.