You’re thrilled to see me for the first time.

Beny Moré croons in the background and you take me into your arms.

Borders, both real and imagined have left us tethered, and unmoored.

You’re all bright eyes and toothy smile. The floodgates burst open and words spill from your mouth like sweet penny candy, slipping past your wet, rouged lips. The S’s and D’s sucked clean off.

My heart is unfurling from the death grip of an embargo,
Blood and guts rush up my throat, I open my mouth to meet yours but a waterfall of copper pours forth, each bit pinging loudly on the floor between us.

I am standing before a vending machine filled to the brim with sweetness, but my hands are full of unremarkable coins, not suitable for this transaction.

My mother hoped to prepare me for this moment, enrolling me in Spanish language school where every chilly Ohio Thanksgiving we made turkeys by tracing our sticky tiny hands onto construction paper. We eagerly took turns peering out of the kindergarten window to announce to the class what the weather had in store. 

Hace Sol
Hace lluvia
Está nublado … or is it nublao?

Childhood communications, so terribly imperfect, are now preterite. A distant mother’s tongue. Inaccessible in my adulthood.

The ocean that has separated us originates inside of me, and it threatens a deluge that will drown us all in my inadequacy.

Some say that a country without a language is a country with no soul. I claw away at sinews, desperate to find the words buried behind, but they do not emerge. This vessel is hollow.

There is so much I want to know about you, that I want you to know about me.

Through the emerging tears I steal a glance through the soaring colonial window of your decaying post revolutionary apartment. It’s sunny outside. Maybe I can talk about that.