Aruba Awakening
"When workaholic attorney Sandra takes a forced vacation to Aruba, dive instructor Kwame awakens parts of her that haven't felt alive in years."
Sandra's therapist had said: take a vacation or take medication. She chose Aruba. She chose wrong—she was bored within hours.
Then she tried diving.
Kwame met her at the beach. Thick, dark, patient with her anxiety. "Relax," he kept saying. "The ocean doesn't judge."
Neither did he.
Her first dive was terrifying. Her second was beautiful. Her third, she started feeling things she'd forgotten existed.
"Yuh carry a lot of tension," he observed afterwards. "Yuh shoulders up by yuh ears."
"Always."
"Not here. Here, yuh let go." He touched her shoulder gently. "Let me help."
His massage was professional. At first.
Then his hands moved with purpose, finding knots she'd held for decades.
"Yuh need to feel pleasure," he said. "Not just absence of pain."
"I've forgotten how."
"Then mi remind yuh."
He reminded her thoroughly. His cottage by the beach, doors open to the breeze, that thick body teaching hers to feel again.
"Yes! Kwame! There!"
She cried. Came. Cried more. Came again. Years of numbness washing away.
"That's it," he murmured. "Feel everything."
She stayed a week past her return date. Then two.
"I have to go back," she said.
"Do yuh?"
She thought about the office. The stress. The nothing.
"No. I don't."
Sandra practices law remotely now. Mornings in Aruba water. Evenings in Kwame's arms.
Her therapist asks what changed.
"I woke up," she says.
And every night, Kwame makes sure she stays awake.
Aruba's gift.
Her awakening.