Hawaii pt. 1: morning

I woke up with the birds.  They began singing about an hour before dawn, their chorus building steadily with the breaking morning light.  I flipped over my phone to check the time—6:15.  The six-hour time change had me shakily in and out of sleep for awhile by then, so I rolled from bed, slunk into my swimsuit and an oversized t-shirt, grabbed my journal from the nightstand, and sleepily wobbled the out the bedroom door onto the patio.  The pre-dawn sky cast a dim purple-blue light over the splash pool and outdoor furniture sets, adding an almost eerie, mystical element to the patio and house beyond.  I set my notebook down on one of the lounge chairs, mesmerized by my first look at the unending Pacific, its horizon crested with columns of pink clouds catching the first of the sunlight.  It’d been a few years since I’d last seen this ocean—that was odd to think about.  I saw the Atlantic a couple times a season on the East Coast—but the Pacific, the inner circle of the ring of fire, the original expanse Pangea’s shatters sprawled into—I hadn’t encountered that entity since the last time I was on the Big Island.
Feeling a surge of excitement for the day, I tossed aside the shirt and slid into the startlingly cool splash pool.  A little less than a minute underwater was enough to clear syrupy, sleepy state of mind I’d been in; I emerged from the pool, not bothering with a towel—I had nowhere to be.  May as well air dry, even if though if this windless morning’s air was more saturated with water than me. 
Not soon after the sun had finally exploded from behind the ridge of a volcano’s mountainous corpse, I’d grown too anxious with anticipation and excitement to write anything of substance in my journal.  Instead, I found myself scribbling down a note to inform my parents of departure.  Woke up early. May or may not be late for breakfast.  Hopefully they’d know well enough by this point to let me roam rather than deal with me bored, thrill-deprived, and complaining of lethargy by the end of the day.  I took off from the townhouse at a jog—might as well make a workout of it—and made my way down the paved golf-cart path to the main resort.  I didn’t bother slowing as I passed through the hotel—without much in the way of walls or a roof (genius architecture)—the hotel was as open as the beach it was placed upon and I felt no need to treat it as any more than that.  It was also still early enough that there was no one around to yell at me; that was, admittedly, probably a larger factor.  
As I hit the beach, it took everything in my power not to strip down and leap into the turquoise lagoon before me.  Impossibly blue, beautiful—surely as luxurious to the touch as it was to the eyes.  I decided I’d find out after my run; it would be all the sweeter.  Right now, the priority was to explore.  I continued, running perpendicular to the snow-white tips of waves reaching up the sand, trying to lure my already boiling feet to its cool touch.  At this point, however, my energy was focused on locating the cliff trail leading from the crescent moon cove of my resort to the white ribbon of the neighboring resort’s beach.  At the far end of said beach, I’d heard rumors of spectacular lava tubes, accessible only at certain tides—if the rise of the ocean wasn’t in my favor, I’d simply swim out to the marveled coral reeves on the fringe of the beach.  Not that I’d see much of anything without goggles, but I was curious to see how my typically land-locked wits would hold up in the open water.  

The cliff trail was magnificent on the ocean facing side; it alternated between lava and coral pebbled beaches to jagged walls of burnt sienna and sable black lava rock.  Looking into the glassy azure from the tops of these cliffs, one could catch glimpses of the ornate reeves budding from the lava rock.  To the non-ocean facing side: mostly empty, multi-million dollar homes.  Still alright-looking, but most definitely not in the same spectrum as the view to my other side.  I broke my pace frequently to traverse out onto the rock and watch the jet black crabs skitter to and fro, somehow always out of the reach of the waves.  I eventually located a nice little flat-topped spire only reachable between waves and climbed atop it.  I sat there for an infinite-feeling couple of minutes, the reality of time warped by the magic of the land.