Lorelai Sharma
I flew here for work.
That’s the truth of it. No grand pilgrimage, no years of saving pennies in a jar. Just a work trip that happened to land me in the one place I’d wanted to see since I was a girl watching detectives chase bad guys across an island that looked too blue to be real.
And then the schedule cracked open. Meetings finished early. A whole afternoon, unclaimed.
I thought about renting a car. Driving to the lookouts. Ticking off the places I’d promised myself for years. Instead, I found a bench in the shade near the Duke Kahanamoku statue, put in one earbud, and pressed play on an old episode I’d already seen twice.
The trade winds came through warm. Sunscreen on my arms, salt in the air, the wood of the bench holding the day’s heat. Somewhere down the beach, a child was laughing at something only children find funny. The waves kept their own time, folding and unfolding. I let the show and the ocean blur into each other.
He sat down without ceremony. An older man, sun on his skin, a smell I still remember: warm skin, salt water, and underneath it something clean and quiet, a cologne worn long enough that it had become his own. He glanced at my screen. Just for a second.
“That,” he said, nodding, “is one of the best shows ever made.”
I laughed before I could stop myself. “I keep telling people that. They don’t believe me.”
“They’re wrong.” He settled back. “You’re a Danny person or you’re a Steve person. I can always tell.”
“Danny,” I said. “Obviously.”
He smiled like I’d passed a test. “The man complains about pineapple on pizza for ten years and never once shuts up about New Jersey. That’s a whole personality.”
We talked like that for a while. Easy. Two strangers agreeing about people who didn’t exist, the way you can only agree about things that once made you feel less alone.
“You know what it’s really about, though,” he said after a stretch of quiet. “Underneath all of it.”
“The chase,” I said.
“The pursuit.” He corrected me gently. “Justice, sure. But also family. Belonging. Everybody on that show is looking for something they can’t quite hold.“
The waves came in. A gull complained about nothing.
He turned to me, not quite a question in his face yet.
“So. What are you in pursuit of right now?”
I didn’t rush the answer. I let it arrive.
“Happiness.”
I’d planned this trip in my head for years. And here I was, not chasing a single thing on my list, just sitting still, watching a show I’d already seen, on a bench that wasn’t going anywhere.
Maybe that was the joke of it. I’d spent so long imagining happiness as a place I’d get to. A lookout. A summit. A destination with good light.
But it wasn’t out there being pursued.
It was here, in the shade, uninvited. The warm bench. The half-heard laughter. A stranger who knew why Danny mattered.
Happiness, it turned out, wasn’t something I’d been chasing.
It was something I kept walking past.
He left before my episode ended. A nod, a take care, and then just the space where he’d been, still holding a little of that clean, salt-warm scent.
The statue stood where it always stands, arms open to a sea it will never stop watching.
I put the second earbud in. Or maybe I didn’t.
I don’t remember. I only remember the wind, and how it stayed on my skin long after the man had gone.