No Haiku Postcards

For the past four years, I’ve taken the same vacation—my best friend plans a trip to some place that she has always longed to see, and I just tag along after her, and because she’s so organized and loves reading guide books, I always let her go ahead and schedule all our activities— 

she’s especially good at finding instructions to obscure, out of the way, non-touristic spots like: “forty paces after telephone pole 17, you’ll see a blue mark on the fence—climb over that fence and follow the path for one mile, until you see....”—

and after all our trips together my complete passivity has become a running joke between us— 

at the beginning of every trip she always asks me gently if there’s anything I want to do, and I always mention one very small, simple activity, for example, when we went to Florence I said, “I really don’t care what else we do, but I must, absolutely must, go to Vivoli’s for gelato”—

but then on our last trip, which was to Maui, when my friend asked me what my agenda item was for this vacation, I said lightly, “well, I’ve noticed on the map that there’s a town in Maui called Haiku and I must, absolutely must go there and get some Haiku postcards,” and she laughed and replied that she thought we could manage to fit it in; however, the truth was, unlike our visit to Vivoli’s in Florence, this visit to Haiku was actually a major agenda item for me because I’d already composed the message for a Haiku postcard I was going to send to a poet I had recently met— 

“Dear Sonia, I thought you needed a postcard from Haiku. And by the way, I seem to have developed a major crush on you, so if you’re at all interested, let me know. Love, Lisa”— 

and I was hiding that fact from my friend because she didn’t know yet that I was a lesbian—

well, no one knew yet, and for that matter, could I even call myself a lesbian if I’d never had sex with a woman before?—

so it was unfortunate that when we got to Haiku, it was pouring rain and we found there was nothing more to it than a drab little strip mall at the edge of the Maui upcountry, and, furthermore, there were no Haiku postcards—

the pharmacist in the Haiku Pharmacy just did not get it—he kept showing me postcards of beautiful Maui landmarks saying, “Well, this is close to Haiku,”—

and then I had to pretend not to be too disappointed and let my friend take photographs of me standing in front of the Haiku Pharmacy and Haiku Hardware, and I was left completely without a plan— 

do you think if I sent Sonia a photograph of me standing in front of the Haiku Trattoria that she would get the message?

by Nina Zolotow


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