I ' ll never forget the episode when a mother had to tell her 19 year old son he was going to die soon . <| sep |> Because it ' s where we ' re headed now ? Why would I not use the current direction of our country in an argument ? Why is that offlimits here ? <| sep |> rockyballoonsShe glances a the mareIt has to boil for a while to soften everything . <| sep |> This sub has always been behind her <| sep |> highstick , thats how we got our pp <| sep |> You need to feel the beach and the islands in your soul before you come here . I don ' t mean love Hawai ' i . Like your first spouse , of course you love Hawai ' i and you adore it and you overlook the flaws and you think you ' ll make it work come hell or high water . But life marches on , and the honeymoon gradually fades , and it ' s the little things that start to pick at you after a while . You go to the gas station to buy gas , and it ' s really expensive . You go to the store to buy a few things , and they ' re really expensive . You pay the monthly electric bill , and you notice it ' s a couple of hundred dollars more than you ' d be paying on the mainland , and your neighbors remark how cheap that is . You drive without really going fast , and you notice that after 30 minutes , or an hour , you ' ve reached the end of the road . It never snows , and you kind of miss decorating Christmas trees when it ' s a humid 78 degrees outside . It ' s the chocolate you buy that everyone advises you eat immediately or put in the freezer , because in about five minutes it ' ll melt into a soggy blob . The cockroaches . Oh God , the cockroaches that appear no matter how spotless you keep your place . The mosquitoes that drive you crazy . The centipedes that will kill you if you don ' t watch where you look and put your hands . The people annoy you the locals who mock and laugh at you , and the tourists with their inane questions about getting lost on an island that ' s near impossible to get lost on because you mapped out every location in the span of a month and a half . The fact that Hawai ' i is split into two environments the city where you literally bleed money just to get out alive , and the country ' s basic lack of infrastructure that makes rural Arkansas feel like downtown Los Angeles . It ' s sunny beach day after sunny beach day after sunny beach day and dammit , you don ' t WANT to swim today , you want to do something other than swim and surf and get involved in the salt water that gets in your eyes and makes you gag for air and oh God , you want off this miserable rock , you ' re selling your place for a song and dance to whomever wants it and you want out , oh you want out of this prison , you ' re Robinson Crusoe not even on Earth but on Mars where the culture is completely alien to you and you don ' t fit it , you don ' t belong , and you finally pick up and leave . That ' s what people mean by rock fever . When you come to live in Hawai ' i , it ' s because you need to live here . Because you ' re feeling claustrophobic on the mainland . Because when you step off the plane , you sniff the airport air and the first scent you detect above the jet fuel fumes is a aroma of tropical pungent flavor from the orchids . And then you go out of the airport , and you take off your shoes and step in the ground somewhere , white sand , black sand , red dirt , and deep inside your bones , inside your DNA , is a feeling that you ' ve come home . You ' ve returned . Hawai ' i is the person you should never have left , who embraces you with open arms , who starts an effortless conversation with you like it was yesterday . If you feel that , you can live here .