one yellow roman candle

I drive to a small clearing in the wet jungle, all overgrown in ferns and sunlight. Shola stands smiling beside a blue tub and metal folding chair, the look on her face all wrinkles and love like she'd been waiting for me at an alter all her life. She motions to the chair, lights incense in an abalone shell. I bridge the gap. Somewhere, a bird sings.

She holds my hands and tells me about the thousand year-old healing bath, how for the last few days every time she ripped cilantro from the stalk or chose a hibiscus flower, she prayed for me. When she filled the blue bucket, she prayed. When she lit the copal incense, she prayed for my peace. For days, unbeknownst to me, Shola had been praying for me.

The bucket sits in the sun. Hibiscus and rosemary, cilantro and basil all form a thick layer on the top of the water. She scrubs the greens and petals raw with her hands.

“You can pray, or scream, or sing,” she says softly as she works, “You can do whatever it is that comes to you.”

She dips a plastic bowl and then lifts it above me. I close my eyes. It is very much the first jump into a Pennsylvania creek on a dare in mid-May. It goes on and on, and I am one big inhale, my skin rising into a million little hills, the yellow dress soaked and clinging. I gasp.

“Breathe!” she says loudly, “Be present! Follow the aloha breath!”
When another pour does not come, I open my eyes. She is squinting and smiling like she just splattered a canvas with paint and has stepped back to see her creation. I am instructed to take the last of the water and pour it out into a spot in the clearing, and with it, rid myself of my poison.

I kneel with the bucket in a patch of grasses the color of Kansas. The sun is low in the sky; nearby, dinner cooks and people gather on the lanai. It will be my last meal here. I tip the bucket onto its side, spill out all that's left, sit for awhile watching the soil consume the water. I remember October when I first arrived here in the little yoga community, how I couldn't stop crying, how I sought comfort in Shola. I remember how she pulled me unsympathetically by the arm into the linen closet. "Go outside behind that dumpster," her crooked finger pointing, "and don't come back until you find your breath."

I am sticky with petals, perfumed with prayers as I walk the worn path to the lanai. The coqui frogs are just coming out, peeping and singing. They seem to say ici. French, someone told me once. Reminding us, another said. Here.