Akulikuli
It feels like somebody’s pounding the inside of my knee with a sledgehammer. Dr Stuart at the Mayo Clinic predicted this fifteen years ago, when he repaired my meniscus. He said it was genetic, that some people are just born with weak knees.
My mother confirmed it.
So today I’m driving to meet a lady who sells BPC-157 peptides. She’ll show me how to inject it into my belly fat.
“Try whatever you can except a cortisone shot,” Dr. Stuart said when I spoke with him last just before he retired. “You’ve just got to make it to fifty, and then you can get the knee replaced.”
If this doesn’t help, I’ll find somebody selling bee venom.
I’ve gotten pretty good at “just making it” to some future point when things will finally be set right.
In my twenties, it was my wedding day. Then moving to a tropical island. Then buying a house and raising a family. Now if I can just make it to fifty.
The only trouble, I’m realizing, is that I rarely notice my arrival. I’m too busy looking for the next place I need to make it to.
The other day I went searching for one of the many hidden queen’s baths on the Big Island: an anchialine pond created by a collapsed lava tube.
After circling the black lava field for twenty minutes, sweat stinging my eyes, my knee throbbing, I turned back.
“You looking for the pool?” An older Hawaiian man said as I walked past.
“Yeah, I thought it was somewhere around here.”
“Look,” He squared my shoulders towards Mt. Hualalai. “You see the akulikuli”?
I stared out in the direction he was pointing.
“That patch of green grass over there,” he added.
My eyes narrowed onto a little section of green fronting black rock.
“If you’re scanning the horizon, you won’t see it. You have to look low and close, not high and far.”
When I finally sank into the cold, brackish water, I understood exactly what the man meant: the pool shielded by jagged rocks, the blazing sun beating down on wild goats eating every bit of akulikuli they could find.
