Slouching Toward San Juan

En la Oscuridad 

Some things are too big to remember, so we remember the light instead. It swelled under a door crack while Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election. It slid through broken blinds in slim panels while I said goodbye to a girl I probably loved. It punctured the night in small bursts while I plucked a guitar’s strings and hummed. We remember the stars and the sun and the fluorescent glare of pharmacies; we remember the moon, how it hangs in the purple air.

I remember the island as phases of light: pale sky in the morning, high-pitched, searing sun at noon, and then, night. The nights were sticky and salty, never silent, and deeper than in New York. I remember that the ocean looked different at night, Costal Azul blended into the sky until I wasn’t sure if my eyes were closed or not. 

We stayed in a broken apartment called Plaza Azul Très. Its quirks included: the maintenance box in the elevator was unlocked and could be opened to full-stop the entire machine, the island was equipped with only one grocery store called Amigo, where we bought fruit and bread and eggs, and then realized that they already had mold, and the “air conditioning” the apartment was advertised as having was one window box in Mom and Dad’s room and one fan in the hallway. I was fifteen and depressed and none of it felt like a vacation, but outside of me, it was beautiful. The ocean stretched north and the mountains crowned the western horizon. The land curved down into a bowl, and Plaza Azul Très was there, in the bowl, in the stomach of Luquillo. 

During that summer, I hated the idea of a family and I hated that I belonged to one. It was easy to pretend that I belonged to myself at home, where I had places that were mine and a bike to ride away on, but I couldn’t in Luquillo. If nothing else, an island will make you feel trapped. And I felt trapped. The apartment was dirty, so I cleaned it, but it still felt dirty. It was August and the heat made things feel heavy; the sun pressed us earthward, toward the sand, toward sleep. I filled the ferry from San Juan to Mata de Plátano with The Gold and Summer Child which heightened the claustrophobia: You don’t have to hold me anymore, our cave’s collapsing. I don’t want to be me anymore. 

Luquillo didn’t breathe in 2017. As the summer faded, Irma moved across the Caribbean and flooded the island, and two weeks later, María approached the archipelago. María knocked out the electrical grid and spilled through Yabucoa, Comerío, and Río de la Plata. Flash floods destroyed houses. Roads and bridges collapsed. I imagine that summer like this: Irma destroys the land, María destroys the people. All of Luquillo goes to Amigo to buy things to help them live, and they return home to realize their bread has mold. The President of the United States throws rolls of paper towels into a crowd of survivors, and months later, he suggests that we use the federal funds allocated for disaster relief to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland. Heads bob above water, and waves crash down. 

I ruined Luquillo before it started. I was acting like a tourist in my own family that summer—untethered, unattached, passing through en route to something more permanent. I was caught in the belief that everyone was doing something wrong, and I basically said that—out loud—every day. (In an English class I took a few years ago, there was a boy who wasn’t doing the readings, and every time he opened his mouth, I’d scowl and shake my head. I couldn’t let him own his experience, I had to take some of it for myself, control the moment by telling him, passively, that I hated him.) There is nothing more threatening to a person who is uncomfortable than someone who is comfortable. There is nothing more threatening to a person in the dark than a city of light. 

El Yunque

There are more cats than people in Luquillo. They curl their bodies into corners of hotel lobbies, lay on car hoods, and haunt hallways. Miguel names one cat Rambutàn and another Tickles, and we walk outside every morning to pet the cats with other kids from our building. There’s a bossy little girl who looks like me when she whines about it being her turn with the cat. Miguel puts the cat at her feet, then tells her, “his name is Tickles.” “I know,” she snaps back. 

Our coffee table in Plaza Azul Très has a pile of brochures about things like ziplining in the mountains, or jet skiing, or the strip of beachside kiosks that send the lyrics of Vivir Mi Vida spiraling through the night and into early morning. Dad tells us WE ARE NOT TOURISTS AND WE DO NOT NEED TO GO ZIPLINING, so instead, we pay a man $20 to crawl into El Yunque through a path in his backyard. 

Dad asks why I wore sneakers to go to the rainforest, and I don’t tell him it’s because I didn’t know that we were going to the rainforest. I don’t tell him anything, because he’s spinning in circles with his arms outstretched, yelling, “Tu madre es—Ay dios mio!” There’s a gully at home with rock slides and bouncing water bugs, and I thought it might feel something like a rainforest—until I saw the real rainforest. The real rainforest swallows you. It whispers and lives and breathes, it is a cathedral, a swamp, a slumping green monster, something mystic and holy. El Yunque is like entering the palace of god. It feels like evidence of something, and it is almost terrifying to see something that is so alive.

I think being a girl in a body and being a girl in a family bear the same horrors: The lack of control, discomfort, the confrontation with femininity—belonging to a family means trimming yourself to fit into the role of sister, daughter, granddaughter, something normative and restrictive. 

Being on an island is the same as being a girl in a body. The day before I saw El Yunque, I watched Sonia scream and dive into waves freely. I studied the way she kicked saltwater up behind her—both feet at once, almost like they were fused into a tail—and I realized that there is something in Twelve that isn’t there anymore by Sixteen. Or maybe there is something missing in Twelve, that incubates during Thirteen, and becomes fully realized by Sixteen. We both have arms and legs and a nose and a stomach, but only one of us has a Body. 

There’s a scene in Disney’s Moana that makes me cry: with her heart taken from her, Te Fiti turns into an ash monster. She crashes around in the ocean with flames for hair, until Moana sings a song and restores her heart, returning Te Fiti to her original form, a goddess of natural life. Te Fiti lies down on the land, sinks her fingers into the soil, and the curves of her hips and stomach and arms become the topography of the island. The land dips and swells with the contours of her body. But not only is Te Fiti’s heart returned to herself; her body is also returned to what a body is and should be: nature. I felt like nature in El Yunque, and it was a relief. 

Guánica

I have a memory of a picture book but I can’t remember its name. The pages were rich and vivid and the plot involved something with animals going into the town at night. Maybe farm animals? I ask my mom what the book is, and she offers four wrong options. I feel like I have memories that no one else does.

We take the ferry to Guánica to visit the village Abuela grew up in. The name “Guánica” is derived from the Taíno “guaynia,” which means "here is a place with water." Despite this, and the more embodied knowledge you gain from the ocean being visible from every place on the island, Uela has never been swimming. She says her mother never thought to show her el océano. 

I figure out, all by myself, that the book is called Ocho Animales on the Town. Just like I thought, it’s about eight animals, mostly of the barn variety, going into the town at night. In Guánica, like in the book, the animales all are welcome in the street. The roads are unpaved dirt, with gallinos vaulting out in front of men on horseback. There are no cars because the city center is small, and the island is made of only ten barrios—stretched over hills, then the valley, then cliffs overlooking the ocean. 

We are in the strange house of distant relatives, and I am glaring for no reason, when an aunt—or cousin—or something says, “you look just like your Papi when you make that face. The eyes are the same.” She’s trapped me: I’m already glaring, so there’s nothing I can do about it except glare harder, and she laughs, “Oyeaye! That’s it!” 

There is the woman—the aunt, who sees too much, and there is her husband who, rather poetically, is blind. We meet our blind uncle, and he meets our voices. We stand in a line and report our names to him, and he corrects our pronunciation: “it no Mih-gel, es Mee-guel. Miguel.” Our names sound right, smoother, out of his mouth. He has us rehearse it a few times. Mee-guel Goh-za-les. 

“Visto los perros, Miguel?,” he asks. 

“Los perros? You mean los gatos?”

“No, perros,” he says. “Treinta y cinco perros.”

Uncle Felo rolls himself away on his wheelchair, and Mee-Guel flashes us a look of horror. “Did he just say treinta y cinco perros?” Sonia points to the couch. There is nowhere to sit in this house because the couches are covered with stuffed animals (mostly dogs, the thirty five perros, we assume). Blind Felo somehow selects a Marc Anthony disc from a CD album, plays Vivir Mi Vida, and falls asleep in his wheelchair while Dad dances with his aunt. There is nowhere to sit on this island, it feels like, because no one needs a seat; they are all always standing and dancing. Voy a reír, voy a bailar, vivir mi vida, la-la-la-la. 

Rain is something softer in Guánica. It comes and goes every ten minutes, but because the sun never sinks, there is always a rainbow. Under one rainbow, Miguel and Sonia find a secret beach with wild horses. We eat mangoes from a tree, biting into them like apples, until the meat is gone from the fibrous pits. “There are people who live here,” Sonia reminds us, “all year long.” This means something different to each of us. On the walk back to the house, we hear barking, follow the sound, and find a large enclosure with thirty five dogs. Treinta y cinco perros. 

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I don’t know what my point is with all of this. Maybe I’ll edit this in a week and add another section that wraps the essay up into something more clean and resolved, but I also might not, because this trip feels unresolved (even after 3 years and even after apologizing to my family group chat about how miserable I was). I think about it romantically because it was romantic and beautiful, and I wish I’d paid more attention. Regret will always be the strongest fist to a gut, and Luquillo will be a sultry summer night, the smell of salt, a blonde cat stretched out on a car, a rainbow. Thanks for reading all of this <333