You can be friends with tuna

One summer, my best friend Tina, asked me to join her in Kauai, an island covered with tropical rainforest in the Hawaiian archipelago.

She was on the swim team in high school and was now teaching scuba diving lessons, so I met her underneath a tiki hut so close to the ocean that you could feel the spritz on your skin when the waves came in.

“Don’t you love the soundtrack of the water here?” she’d ask me multiple times as Kiwi basked in the sunshine.

I figured after the second time she wasn’t really looking for an answer from me because she already knew it in herself.

That’s what I’ve always admired about Tina, she was so connected to herself that there was an ease every time we were together.

I couldn’t believe how fast the week went by when she drove me to the airport.

“You better come back soon,” she said as we hugged, and I tilted my head as if to confirm, but just to make sure I’d follow through, she had written the words on a wooden pineapple that she handed me as a souvenir.

For portfolio purposes only. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or locales is entirely coincidental.