From my Marshall Islands journal.

This is a time I love, when it's grown too dark to read but not to see, when the palms are feathery black silhouettes and the entire world is painted in watercolor shades of purple and blue. The wind carries away sound, its rushing like the muffled silence of a good snowfall. Behind me, I know, babies are crying and lives are bring lived, but here on the edge of the lagoon there is only clouds and sky and ocean and a lone white star. And the eternal wind. When evening sets like this I can feel it wash over me like the colors washing the sky. 

These are the rare moments when living on a tropical island is how I imagined it would be, clean and gently swaying in a hammock while trash fires burn in the jungle and wisps of smoke drift from cookhouses. I sit with my toes in the sand until it grows dark, until the river of stars in the night sky fuses seamlessly with the water and I find myself sitting in the middle of a giant glittering bowl, held in the center of a transparent globe of stars. The waves are lapping softly against the shore, just a whisper of sound, the air a warm caress against my skin. Then, in the distance, a flash, followed by a second. Dark clouds spread over the stars like inkspots seeping onto cloth. Lighting flashes again and again, pulsing from deep within the gathering masses of darkness, illuminating the cavernous clouds. Soon, the rain will come, pounding against the metal roof, running in rivulets down the walls, soaking the grateful earth. Sometimes I think I will wake up and this will all have been a dream.