El contento en lo nublado: Post III of more than III

Gray, windy, warm Boca Ciega, Cuba.

The first of two times Ruby got overly emotional was when she talked about Fidel’s death. He was a good president, she said. They mourned his death this way: no music, no celebrations. The skin under her eyes darkened red and she took out a napkin to wipe underneath her glasses. Raúl is of a different mind than Fidel. He has the face of Fidel but he’s going to change things. So I went downstairs and slept until morning.

I wake up when I want to and have a cafecito with perfect eggs, and then a café con leche because. I walked to the store to buy butter, rum, yogurt, water, and cigarettes. I never got the butter, I guess, now that I think about it. And then I grabbed my book and made my way to the green moss landing on the windy beach. Let’s stop making this so informational and move to the postmodern anthropologist dip of my temperament…I’ll lay out some of my emotional reactions. Well, maybe just one for right here: contentment. I felt content filtering in and out of their second-floor conversations, intent on under-imposing myself. On the beach I was content. I smoked cigarettes while reading my Ferrante novel and trying harder and harder to connect my flighty thoughts to proportionate emotions. I mediated this contentment to such an extent that day that when Cusita answered the phone with a cigarette in her other hand and I heard my sister’s distant voice, I smiled a real smile. Kathryn had called to find me because she had spoken with one of our other sisters, who had told her that I flew away the day before. So she went to Aaron, who explained that he knew he probably wouldn’t hear from me until I landed back in Miami, and no, he didn’t really know where exactly I was but my taxista friend Arturo was picking me up and had found a place for me to stay. Imagine at least six feet of peace-sapped snow pile atop my astute, loving, critically thinking sister. Um. So yes, I explained to her where I was, description-wise (Boca Ciega, just outside of Havana, four-story house, Ruby, ask along the way, etc.) and told her that—obviously—I had left some kind of a trail. I mean, if Aaron had really needed to get a hold of me, he would’ve thought, shit, I guess I’ll have to call Banning and Canción and see where they think she ended up, and wait, maybe I actually have Arturo’s contact info (yes, you do, Aaron) so I’ll just e-mail him and see. And then, to Kathryn, “How exactly did you go about finding me?” Oh, she contacted Canción. Muah! Still smiling.

I’m gonna break in here to unriddle the why of my circuitous experience way last year in December, 2016. We’ve all come so far since then, I’m sure we can agree. Closer to God, perhaps, and/or finding ourselves in ever-increasing proximity to a Cheeto-dust bathed hell—Thank you, Nina Donovan. I’m gonna chase it as far as I’ve gotten without losing my breath to shame—necessary and unnecessary prolix will be involved, for those of you who need to set your expectations. It would be OKAY if I had just been tired, so I went to Cuba; It would be JUST FINE if took my Christmas week to lie on the beach in a green one-piece, reading a 400-page novel ’cause I wanted to; It would be UNDERSTANDABLE—and fucking copacetic—if I had taken a break from dreamy camper life in order to sleep alone, nobody tocando mis pechos, no dead squirrels in my boots. In fact (my facts, heh…) I’m coursing through the flux, trying to differentiate secret parts of me before the bad ones fuse to, well, me—Not all of of the secret files, of course, but mainly just the least inconvenient ones. What did I even just say in that sentence? Nice fucking disclaimer, I suppose.

So I’ll just say I recognize a resolve in me about being more tired than I was 10~ years ago and I stay the avoirdupois (inescapable use of this word here) of not having gone further in my own internal investigation—not in an academic way exactly (because, ya know, kids are just not made of the same stuff as that Cultural Anthropology, 3rd Edition textbook. This is not to say that I didn’t immediately begin to develop skills for keeping children alive (success so far, by the way). I am tired because I slingshot from inclinations toward independence to longing for interdependence to caretaking for others’ emotions. So more like a triangle slingshot…um, yes. I know and I know and I know that there is more to me. So before this gets way too me-centric (I know, blog = ….anyway). And so I need to find the vigor to begin where I am. And by the way, it’s probably gonna be like me having to turn in a ten-page paper on Derrida in three days time—and I haven’t been in academia since 2008. Also, don’t compare me to my sister Annie, who is crazy-loca and started law school while her husband is in med school, she has a toddler (Love you, Mack!), and lives in the middle of America. Oh yeah, and wouldn’t you decide to have another baby (Your favorite tía loves you, Noble!) to make that second year of law school more exciting?! I could survive the Derrida paper, I posit, but only because I would download Ajit’s brain into my own and recast the brilliance into my own little words to turn in. And no, I can’t do a recap of all the shit I just spit out. Because I don’t fully understand what this fucking haze that I’m trying to get off the whites of my eyes is—not yet. But that first day in Cuba was contentment.

So more posts to come on Christmas in Cuba, I guess, because I’ve only made it through Thursday. Fotos while you wait: