I always wanted to be in a hurricane. Not read about one. Not watch it on the Weather Channel. Be in one. Feel it. Let it remind me I’m just skin, bone, and borrowed time. And as luck—or lunacy—would have it, one finally came.
It was tracking right between Oahu and Kauai, and up on the North Shore, it looked like God was getting ready to flip the whole island over. Little Haleiwa was boarded up like a ghost town. Stores shut tight. Gas lines. Water gone. Cops everywhere, looking less like protectors and more like they were waiting for the looting to start.
Everyone else was stocking up, heading inland, bracing for impact.
I was staring at my phone.
Had this radar app—one of those you can switch to wind view. I zoomed in, watched the storm breathe. You could see it. The eye. Clean, white, spinning. Ten, maybe fifteen miles offshore. Coming right at us.
Most people panic. I packed the car.
I had my little Filipino girlfriend with me—no title, of course. Sweet, worried thing. I think that’s why she let me treat her the way I did. I was something different. Dangerous. Temporary. She liked the burn. I told her we were going to the eye of the storm. She looked at me like I was insane, but didn’t say a word. That’s how I knew she was mine—for the moment, anyway.
We drove through police barricades like it was nothing. Took a back road near Foodland, curved up into the hills where we used to cliff jump. The ocean down below looked like rage—twenty-foot waves smashing the bay into foam. No surfers. No boats. Just violence. You could feel it vibrating through the earth.
I checked my phone.
The eye was maybe ten miles away.
Then I did the dumb thing.
I got out.
It was pouring. Sheets of rain slapping down like punishment. Wind howling. I pulled up my hoodie and stood there like a lunatic, smiling. My girl followed, because there was a reason she was with me, and it wasn’t for my long-term potential.
We walked closer to the edge, the wind pelting us sideways.
It was glorious.
It was chaos in motion.
I saw a squad car with its lights spinning, just watching us. They didn’t even try to stop us. Probably figured we were already too far gone. I stared at the radar again—now the eye was only two miles away. And I felt it. The wind shifted. What had been hitting my face was now pushing against the back of my skull. The eye had passed—barely. Never made landfall, but it brushed so damn close you could taste it in your teeth.
You don’t forget something like that.
Standing on the edge of the Pacific, storm screaming at your back, knowing full well you shouldn’t be there—and loving every goddamn second of it.
We were the only ones out. Even the cops left. And that silence afterward, that eerie emptiness? It was almost religious.
Back in Haleiwa, no flooding. No chaos. Just calm. Like the whole thing had been a private show.
And we got front row seats.
That gave me an idea.
We went to this little private beach—nobody around. I stripped down naked, walked right into the ocean.
Hurricane water. Had to do it. Had to say I swam in it.
The surface was flat, like glass. Haunting, really. Except for the jellyfish.
Whole goddamn bloom of them.
Probably got swept in by the storm.
I think one of them stung my dick.
Worth it.
There’s something about island life. Something brutal and beautiful. Something that humbles you in all the right ways. You stand there against nature—not to beat it, just to witness it—and for one brief second, all the noise falls away. The titles. The bullshit. The paycheck. The past. You remember how small you are, and how good it feels to not matter.
It’s not just thrilling.
It’s clarifying.
And I’m thankful for that moment—drenched, wind-whipped, stung, grinning like a madman in the middle of something massive.
Because that’s the closest I’ve ever come to feeling alive.
