To Love a Star

To love a god is to draw a noose around your neck.

Where the divine and mortal meet, they meet in fire and wrath and destruction.

Stars are not meant for this earth.

– Hōpoe, the mortal lover of the Hawaiian goddess Hiʻiaka-i-ka-poli-o-Pele

The chants will not tell you this, but I am the one that taught hula to the Goddess of Dance.

Hula is pure. Its breadth lies beyond the body, recounting adventure and tragedy through movement. Dancing is a liquid, molten art.

Even after I am dust, even if she forgets, if all the world forgets, it will be true. That is my immortality. I lived, and I loved, and that has to be enough.

* * *

My love has many names:

Mother of Sorcery. Master of Chants. Healer of the Sick.

But to me, she was always simply Hiʻiaka.

The image of her face was imprinted behind my eyelids, blossoming in sunspots. Her eyes were real and warm, brown as earth and soil. That is how I felt, at the time: nourished, replenished, as if she had poured ʻawa, the drink of the gods, into my bones.

* * *

Do you regret it?

Other spirits ask me this often. As the years wear on—time is smoke here, in the ao kuewa, the realm of the unloved—younger souls tell me she brought people back from the dead. So why not you? they ask.

I have no answer. I suppose I am worthy of flower-filled groves and dances on the beach only. Hiʻiaka’s was a love that could rend the stars from the sky.

Just not for me.

* * *

The night she left me, rain gushed from the sky like blood from a wound.

I met her sister only once: Pele, Goddess of Volcanoes. I remember how power wreathed the air around her like a perfume. She did not think highly of my union with her sister, whether because we were both women or because I was mortal, I did not know. You are nothing, she seemed to say. You will rot and decay, and my sister will forget you.

It frightened me, the surety I felt in her gaze. The insatiable maw of time would swallow me up and spit me out like raw meat, but Hiʻiaka would live on forever, with infinite lovers, without me. I was a human, a simple knitting of clay. As I overheard Pele ask once, "Why not love the mud itself?"

But Hiʻiaka held me at her side, gentle and tender. I would have been content to die there, if not for Pele's request.

"I have taken a lover from Kauaʻi," the volcano goddess said bluntly one day, appearing before us on the water's edge. "I have met him only in dreams, but I wish to meet him in flesh."

"I will fetch him for you," understood Hiʻiaka, running her fingers through my hair. The hair is the crown of the soul, the source of our mana. I allowed only Hiʻiaka permission to touch it. "Provided you extend your protection over Hōpoe and my lehua grove in my absence, I will return with haste."

"I am not patient by nature. I insist you bring him back in forty days."

At this, Hiʻiaka stilled. "Forty days? Sister, that journey—"

"You will not take Lohiʻau for your own. You will bring him to me." Pele cut her eyes to me. "For forty days alone, I will protect your wahine." She let the threat hang unfinished.

The Goddess of Dance looked at me then, concern flashing across her ethereal features. Pele was notorious for her caprice. "I will do it in less," Hiʻiaka promised.

She set off that same night, rain pouring in torrents around us.

I stared, bereft, as she made her final preparations. Make me a goddess, I wanted to say. Let me stay by your side until the stars go cold.

"I love you, Hiʻiaka," I whispered.

"And I you." She answered easily.

“No.” I tried again. “You do not understand. I—” You are everything I have ever loved. You are my sun and moon and ocean, and you will leave and forget me, and I am afraid I will die of it.

“I do understand,” Hiʻiaka said kindly. “I feel the same.”

She knew many things, yes. She knew spells and curses and epic tales of eons long past and genealogies and chants. But she did not know how the human soul aches to twine with another’s, how it is whole upon itself but hollow in the core, fleeting and desperate and leaf-thin. Gods cannot know love because there is nothing they fear losing.

But seeing other women in the canoe—beautiful, full-bodied women with pitying gazes and obsidian hair—the rest of my words died in my throat. I knew this from the moment we met: that I was hers, and she was not mine.

The goddess clasped my hand in hers. “You are my heart,” she told me. She touched her forehead to mine, sighing out of her nostrils. This is hā, the breath of life. “I will not be long without you, I swear it. I will keep you safe from her, Hōpoe. Ma koʻu naʻau, in my gut, I know it.”

Naʻau is many things in our language: gut, yes, but also heart, soul. To feel something in your naʻau is to hear its echoes in your marrow. Words spoken from the naʻau carry the weight of the spirit.

And Hiʻiaka’s words were a goodbye.

I stood silently as the canoe carried her into the horizon.

* * *

The earth screamed before I died. I remember that most vividly.

On the forty-first day, the ground shook with a roar as Pele's molten rage crawled over the island. My legs trembled, but I continued to dance. I loved dance, and I would perish doing what I loved.

Hiʻiaka will save me, I thought, stubbornly. She promised. She will come back with Lohiʻau, and Pele will be appeased. At any moment I will see her on the horizon.

I did not.