NIKKI BYRD — writer, thinker, lover

A twenty-three-year-old Nikki Byrd wipes the hot, rolling tears off her face in a swell of heat. She wails and rocks like a grief-stricken mother whose child dies in a spontaneous tragedy — witnessing a stoic in such a rare happening appears to be a blight in the sequence of the universe. Turmoil dotes on the vicious cycle of vicious emotions; her knuckles turn white, she gasps, she screams, and it wrings her like a soaking wet towel. Ten minutes pass, thirty, then sixty, and catharsis is the well-oiled machine that wields her by releasing the steam, unleashing the pressure that builds in the center of her chest. Her ears feel like firecrackers; she has sweat and snot for makeup; it’s alllll unironically theatrical. Rocky, a Maltese, and only audience member, raises an eyebrow and exits her bedroom in relief. At every exhale, an unbearable aching knocks at her chest: LET ME OUT. She thinks, I never even cried like this over a boy.

A mirror in her room reflects an unruly character of misfortune; she doesn’t stare long. Emotions, she finds, are embarrassing. Growing up, they are alien and fleeting, belonging to a species that understands their origins. Time sends them away to a distant land, vanishing before she musters the courage to invite them to dinner. 

If you go to Google on Nikki’s phone, the blinking cursor gives you a dropdown of suggestions:

What is the science behind love?

What are the emotions associated with intense feeling?

When you love someone, is it strictly scientific, or is it spiritual too?

Her shirt is a disposable napkin, and wrinkles after she wipes her running nose. What a bitch! It’s not like Nikki really cares that much about Cayla, so what is this all about? So what, they met in second grade, and SO WHAT they went to that stupid Hannah Montana concert together, and SO WHAT they smoked weed for the first time behind that abandoned church when they were sixteen? SO WHAT?

To placate the emotions raging through her, Nikki sits at the edge of the bed and begins a steady, conscious stream of rationale. She realizes her television is on. It’s Seinfeld; the world is turning. 

Friendships are temporary and seasonal — they do not last, they ebb and flow, they disappear into the abyss of time; they remain, sometimes, a grain of memory in the infinite expanse of the mind. But…sisterhood..well, it’s supposed to be a lifetime bonded by blood and obligation…but this sisterhood, well… Oh, brother. Nikki reaches for the practicality of her consciousness: stop this nonsense, stop this crying! You’re ridiculous. Waves of the duvet cover Nikki’s phone screen just enough to where the last words of Cayla’s frightfully personal knifings stare at her: “Don’t ever contact me again. This friendship is over.”

Oh, fucking well. Cayla… who’ll miss her?

Friends, like seasons, come and go, come and go… they come and go. Sidewalks begin to burn the soles of the neighborhood summer children. The swimming pool in the backyard boils in the day, stills in the night, assuaging its waters for Nikki’s fragility in an attempt to embrace and bless her with divine strength. At 7:55am, Nikki emerges every day in sunglasses and a bathing suit, even on the days when it rains; broken hearts take refuge in a schedule – it knows what hour strikes the hardest with the unrelenting demand of agony and the hour that grants mercy and sometimes even carelessness. On the scorching Louisiana days, she tries to remember all who abandoned her as she disintegrates under an inferno of sweat, their faces warping in a strange fog that never clears. She laughs. Alas, the Almighty has endowed her with the faculty of forgetfulness! Only some mirages, either during sweltering heat or spontaneous cloudburst, handicap her with a surge of emotion that captivates her to a numbing paralysis. No friend has left such a vestige as deep-rooted and unbearable as Cayla.

On a Saturday in June, Nikki palms the soil in her garden and realizes it has been over a month since it’s rained. The chrysanthemums pale, the peonies wilt and stiffen, and the daffodil petals blow away in the wind; the grass crunches with each step she takes. The same day, Nikki encases her heart in stone and buries it in an ironclad casket — exulted. An event as galvanic as this writes an itinerary led by a pitying and seraphic hand. Her boyfriend, now a phantom, tires in Nikki’s purgatory and passes on to another life, his existence winking before disappearing into the sea of time. Denial is that lurking force in the blindspot of life, exercised by the strong arm of mental fortitude. Marijuana and friends hold her hand through it all, and all the doors she closes open again with new faces and new meanings. 

Sometimes, baked with weed lard, she disappears into the crevices of her mind and remembers the time she made Cayla learn the last dance in Cheetah Girls (in the second movie, not the first). Nikki thinks that was crazy because who in their right mind listens to a 10-year-old say, “And again – five, six, seven, eight!” Or the time Nikki’s rotten entitlement got the best of her, and Cayla went to hold her hand. Yanking away, Nikki felt the ice pumping through her veins melt with a sister’s gesture; that annoyed her.

In the middle of a social gathering, Nikki could only be seen quiet, shaking her head. So silly to love someone. More silly to be angry by the feeling, but that, in itself, is reasonable. A few years before, the two girls sat in Cayla’s sunroom and were so high their irrepressible laughter almost took them to the hospital…literally. Whatever. The tragic and trite belief “to love someone” is just a thing we did, us humans, that outlined the dullness of life in sparkling and iridescent color. But to be loved by another and studied by curious and tender eyes is a nakedness that Nikki cannot bear. That very revelation is insufferable, and she begins to hate Cayla’s overt vulnerability that allows her to experience a realm of emotions Nikki isn’t acquainted with. Satisfaction is found in this conclusion: it’s better Cayla left; being that defenseless against love isn’t healthy.

Yeah…Cayla… who’ll miss her…

The world begins to look a little different; Nikki, quoting her father, is comforted by the platitude: friends come and go, which she accepts as dogma and repeats when her heart and mind begin recessing to emotional malfunction. The light of day is only seen from her bedroom window. Phases of Nikki’s suffering are unheeded by all, with the exception of her parents, whose wish is to ameliorate it. Like all loving parents, they carry her burdens with a yoke, and their days are not the same. Her father, the wisest man she knows, tells her many things in attempt to witness the gentle gleam that shined from the pit of his daughter’s soul. “In five years,” he says, “Cayla will be a stranger.” Nikki, in desperate times, takes the anodyne. “I’m sure someone else will replace her anyway,” she affirms. 

July.

August.

September.

October. 

In November, during a conversation about daily happenings, Nikki, as casual as a t-shirt and jeans, informs her parents she will live on a farm in Maui for three months at the beginning of March. Photos from previous farmers show huts painted by their inhabitants, with bright yellows, oranges, greens, and blues; names and years of the people before are scrawled across the wooden boards of the living quarters. The farm is solar powered, albeit not with the most advanced technology and panels, so there will be no power, Nikki says, and she will be living off the land and showering outside in hopes there is always propane to keep the water warm.

Panic descends on the Byrd household, and Nikki wonders if she’s entered the next level of hell. The Catholic guilt is shameless and riddled with logical fallacies, and for the first time in months, there is something within her demanding to fight. It’s a lot. 

Her dad reads her every crime stat and shows her pictures of the island’s critters and wild animals while prepping her for an inevitable volcanic eruption that is just bound to happen. Determination buries every incitation of fear with a vengeance and spits on its grave. The appearance of every emotion trapped within her transforms into kinetic energy, almost instinctual, despite the passive nature of her recent past. At the airport, she hands her parents a letter. Nikki walks into departures; she never sees her mother cry. 

On the plane, Nikki thinks, finally, I’m one of those people — an explorer of radical, unimaginable phenomena. The future lies in nothing. Anxiety seems stupid now because what is there to have anxiety about? An island? Well, that’s just not logical. 

The travelers (she brings a friend) live in a refurbished greenhouse that fits a queen bed and a dresser. Verdure surrounds their sanctuary and gives directions. 

Nikki questions everything after watching the signal bars on her phone battle before bed in the gentle chirping of Hawaiian nightlife; the owner doesn’t believe in electricity, so the hum of a TV show to help her fall asleep ceases to be an option. Kula is a town in upcountry Maui on the now green slopes of the Haleakalā volcano that emanates a rare and majestic beauty… but also breaches phone signals. Watching someone try to make a call on the farm is a spectacle and one you try not to entertain as it involves many archaic methods like pacing, holding up the phone, holding down the phone, and squinting against the sun in one particular spot. Nikki feels like a troglodyte. Give her a rock and some berries, and her hieroglyphs will be the wonders of the future. Five minutes up the road is a food truck; twenty minutes away from the food truck, there is nothing. 

Milk is twice the price at the local grocery store down the road (bad), but they sell the freshest poke she’s ever tasted (good). Next door to the market is the laundromat where auntie and uncle make a living.

Maui is the dream that pats her on the back when the farm owner, Boss, shows her the compost toilet.

“That’s mainly for poop, though,” he says. “You can pee anywhere you want.” Nikki nods and almost solutes. She’s the bravest soldier you’ll ever see. The dwellers living there reveal an exchange for hard work includes weed and falafel nights from Boss. Something about them seems content: the barter system it is. 

On the second night, unable to get any phone signal, Nikki realizes she’d been waiting for Cayla to be ready all her life to venture, and the ache of her absence, along with restlessness, pushed her 4,000 miles away from home. Cayla’s words, so ugly and true, must be rewritten.  

Hobbies of Maui’s inhabitants include: being outside. Their first order of business on a tropical island is the coast. Beaches, even with the darkest waters, are nostalgia’s refuge. The ocean, an entity of clear rolling glass, kisses the horizon. When she sees Nikki, she sneers. As adolescents, Nikki and Cayla met her for the first time and feared her. Through hellish and vibrant years of teenage angst, the two girls became two women, and their bellies danced with the warmth of her laughter around their shins. Now, she stands alone, fiercely (ambivalently?) akimbo, and the ocean mocks her? A prayer appears: forgive. 

In the first month, the traveler is mistaken for a farmer. She propagates succulents, hauls bamboo, prepares soil mixtures, and tends to seedlings. There’s lots of pots: two inch, four inch, twelve inch, sixteen inch. A forty-foot freight container harbors tools for every duty that befalls her. Music slows down when she prunes the ti plants; clean feet and hot tea, not sunsets, are the marks of eventide. Warm white battery-operated string lights guide her roommate as she rolls a joint. New memories are born in smoke. It’s a ritual. 

By the second month, the girl, whoever she is, climbs down the top bunk in a new hut (the first dwellers leave the island), looks in the mirror, perceives nothing. The sun waves hello through the window facing east by casting his morning shadows. Then, she puts on slippers, walks to the outdoor kitchenette, and makes coffee she calls crack with a french press as old as the land. Later, the girl tucks a succulent the size of a quarter into compacted soil. Most petals are withered and damaged by lack of sunlight, or maybe the snails got to it. An expert she wasn’t. 

“The plant is no good. Go ahead and throw it in the trash pile,” says the farm manager.

“Can I save it?” she asks. 

He inspects the plant like a pediatrician. 

“Nah.” 

Eight people squabble about who’s taking a shower first. The only thing she worries about is Caesar, the wolf spider that camouflages in the twigs bowering the outdoor bathroom. During twilight, she rinses off the day. The mirror in their hut has a film of dust no one ever cares to clean because, honestly, what’s the point? All she knows is she’s brown, and her efforts are sown. The succulent, tied to its fate, sits on her windowsill, awaiting morning for the sun’s embrace. Two days later, the remaining petals wilt, and it dies. 

The farm thrives in the fever. Nikki, pulling weeds from the weed mat, boils in wet heat. If she melts, she ceases to exist, and after experiencing such unbearable weather conditions, she wonders if that’s such a bad thing. She thinks, the chickens lay eggs every day; she prays for their tenacity. The Chill Room, with a leather couch, two chairs, and an empty cooler, becomes a sanctuary when it rains, and silence falls among the foreigners. Back home, it rains; here, it weeps, and she loves no one feels obligated to interrupt God’s catharsis with mere human triviality. 

All she could think of during the deluge was a ten-year-old Cayla eating six glazed donuts in one sitting from the swamp’s cafe. A thirteen-year-old Cayla looking at older boys on Facebook and prank calling them at two in the morning. At a party, a fifteen-year-old semi-sober Cayla pretends to be Nikki when her mom calls; Nikki palms a bottle of tequila in a bathtub somewhere nearby. Eighteen-year-old Cayla begins life in a one-bedroom apartment with her cat, Marlon, forty-five minutes away from her mother and stepdad. Twenty-year-old Cayla closes her eyes and tosses her hair, moving rhythmically on the dance floor at their favorite club. A twenty-one-year-old Cayla calls in the middle of the night four states away. A boy, a monster, has stolen her heart.

“I want to come home,” she whispers.

Nikki says, “Come home.” 

Their road trips, short and long, become a phantasmagoric short film in her mind, accompanied by a motion picture soundtrack featuring Tame Impala, Frank Ocean, Lana Del Rey, and Summersalt. When the downpour quits the farm, Nikki immediately brings the bluetooth speaker from under the awning, and a playlist with the same artists begins. Pain manifests unpredictably through the simplest actions. Victims of its emphatic bloodshed recognize the inhabitance of its nature in others. No one ever asks her to change a song. 

Tropical heat keeps eyes open that night. Even a long day of labor does no justice. The hut’s open window is a beacon on the black farm; not a gust of wind has pity on them. Eating is the next best thing to cure boredom, but a small fry is seven dollars and sixty-eight cents at Mcdonald’s in Maui. What’s fries without a milkshake? Total per person comes to seventeen dollars and ninety-eight cents. Leaving the hut this time of night means dirty feet, a flashlight, and about 5% of a charged battery for GPS. Roommate reminds Nikki of the gas prices; filling up the tank of their 2001 sedan is a felony. Plus, Caesar and his friends hide everywhere: in corners, inside the compost, behind the seasonings in the cabinet, under car dashboards, shaking hands with the cloak of darkness.

“Both of my batteries are out of juice, too,” Nikki says. The screen of the dead iPad reflects her dismay. “So, no movie.” 

“We could smoke again,” says Roommate.

“Ugh, I’ve had enough, I think.” 

“We’re almost out anyway.” Roommate assesses the half-empty baggy. Nikki thinks of the farm manager’s orange dreads. He’ll have more. 

“You ever talk to anyone back home?” Nikki asks. Resonance of the rain jumbles with her emotions. The thing about farm weed is that it was always a hybrid. No label, no identified strain, just handled by the diligence of the farmers who appreciate its effect. 

“Every other day or so. I’m here right now. So, I’m here.” 

“That makes sense. Plus, we are in a timezone five hours behind. With the full days, it’s hard to call or even miss anyone.” 

“I’ll see them when I see them,” says the evasive Roommate. 

The conversation wanes. If Cayla was there, she’d been in the same bunk bed. If Cayla was there, they probably would’ve said fuck it, and went to get fries and dipped them in their milkshakes. If Cayla was there, they’d go to Changz and watch the moon’s glitter on the tide before falling asleep on the sand. If Cayla was there, all her love and freedom for the island could be shared with another; she’d be understood. If Cayla was there, Nikki would never know what it’s like to feel truly alone. 

Awake and blue, she hears Roommate shift in her bunk. Nikki jumps off the cliff.

“I miss Cayla,” she says. “I don’t think we’ll ever talk again.”

“I never go back to the ones who’ve hurt me.” 

“Do you forgive them?” Nikki holds her breath.

“No. Would you forgive Cayla after all the hurtful things she said to you?”

“I already have.”

“Why?”

“Because I love her,” declares Nikki. “What does hating her do? It spares me an unbearable amount of effort to hate her when I can just love her. What do I gain in hating besides sickness? I think of all the awful things I’ve done to her that have led to this. Maybe I was deserving of it.” 

“You must think her words are true.”

“They were a truth. Not the truth. I was…am probably all those things, but I am more than that, too.” A pin drops. “In a way, I’m proud of her. I think it’s the most honest anyone has ever been with me.”

“So just reach out to her.” Roommate’s getting annoyed.

Nikki shakes her head at the ceiling. “That’s not my destiny.” 

After Nikki relives every memory of Cayla, she lays it in thistledown. Something happens when a truth, sometimes shameful, always freeing, is acknowledged. You realize it, itself, lives its own existence without possession. It takes a trip to the universe and disappears. 

The third month shakes Nikki. She runs naked into the ocean and stays for hours. The mountains say hi from where she swims, and powerful and resounding gratitude unfolds in her chest. She prays: Thank you for my health and this once-in-a-lifetime experience. Thank you for the love, thank you for the resistance, thank you for the battle. Thank you, thank you, thank you. 

Alone in the water, but never truly, she’s enraptured. “Oh, how far we’ve come!”

The farmers arrive home well after twilight. They talk in hushed tones taught by the ocean. Absent of city lights, a shooting star electrifies the sky. If you winked, you missed it. “Make a wish!” someone insists. Margaritas Nikki makes from scratch turn everyone’s face pink. Ice, which they rarely possess, is eyeballed every few seconds to ensure its existence. The Mexican night succeeds with a little help from their god, a propane stove, and the music she downloads on the way back from the beach plays over a Bluetooth speaker on its last charge. Plates and bowls of grilled chicken, sauteed onions, smoked bell peppers of all colors, rice, refried beans, lettuce, guacamole made from the farm’s avocado tree, pineapple salsa, pico de gallo, tomatoes, spicy queso, jalapenos, sour cream, cheese, cilantro, corn, tortillas, and lime take up the entire island of the kitchenette lit by battery operated bulbs and two lanterns. They laugh and joke until, one by one, they retire. She stretches in bed, the good kind that leaves tingles and goes to sleep. Full. 

Thousands of miles away, Cayla stares at the ocean from a balcony. In the morning, Nikki’s phone makes a foreign sound.

Cayla Willis

imessage

Inside Nikki, the only shut window in a room full of thousands opens. Does Nikki need Cayla’s love to survive? Nah, but souls don’t care about insignificant human obstinance. 

Rooommate sweeps the hut two days before they go back home. Nikki takes disinfectant and cleans the memories off every surface. Led by a divine hand, she paints “Enjoy every moment” on the wall. It’s also the first time Nikki cleans the mirror. 

A year later, two sisters sit on a cloud in front of the Pacific Ocean. The whitecaps kiss the azure before tiptoeing to the shore and greeting them. Bliss seizes their chest as the ocean calls and beckons. They race each other into her open arms and plunge into her depth of a thousand fathoms.

Every caress of her waves gargles their giddy laughs. Millions of possibilities lie before them, her fragile temperance a thrilling virtue among human souls. The welcome they receive is a mother’s promise. “No riptides. No sharks. Just me and you.” Stupefied, Cayla and Nikki float, rest even, in her mystique.

On the shore, they become lachrymose in light of her divine deliverance. They are blessed to be there. As Cayla looks to the horizon, Nikki’s eyes close against the sand and she hears the subtle birdsongs twinkling among the sound of crashing waves. If you fall asleep for a few hours, you’ll awaken to the starlit sea of infinite space. The lucky ones are serendipitous and see the winking tear of a shooting star.

Black spots dance behind Nikki’s eyelids; the wind tickles her ears and legs. She remembers she is barely on Earth but in a corner of the Kingdom of Heaven. Cayla, attached to all things, stares at her father, the sun, and wishes she is attached to nothing at all. There, she desires to be everything but kin to reality and hooks her toes stubbornly in the sand as if to say, “I’m staying.”

All their remembrances disappear with the tide, and the two women don’t know who they are. Time unfolds in a spontaneous fashion on the beach; egos are lost.

Nikki opens one eye and stares at Cayla’s back, her wet hair sprawled like tentacles on her arms and shoulders.

Nikki says, “Being here makes me not want to exist.”

Cayla says, “When I am here, I don’t.”

That night, they yield to their religion. The sun holds counsel with his children, and dismisses them with a visceral spirit, and they spread his joy and love to every soul they lay a touch. Beaming, he, the sun, brushes their hair, kisses their cheeks, and nudges them to be. And so the two friends shimmy on white gowns that whisper on their skin and accentuate their curves.

Nikki says, “Smell my breath.”

Cayla says, “Smell my pits.”

The party calls; they answer. Over a span of eight hours, they take thirty photos, none of which show the hippies who give them a handful of the devil’s finest and funkiest lettuce, their slow dance so rhythmically in tune the walls can’t help but stare, the contagion of their laughter. Reggae music plays all night at every venue, in every car they jump into. At 3 AM, they make it to bed, hover over their cellular devices, and comment on the happenings of the night.

Nikki, reticent compared to Cayla’s passionate disposition in matters of affection, says her favorite words to her favorite person. In the way Nikki does, very quietly and intimately, as freely as the drapes billowing from the early morning’s somnolent coos, says, “I love you.”

Cayla’s eyes swell.

“I love you.”