Frío, frío, caliente
I’m never truly dry when I go back to my island. The one shaped like a triceratops that’s not even two hours away yet takes an entire day to fly to because the flight is always delayed. When I land, sweat is beading at my lip by the time I’m at baggage claim. By the time I’m at Tata’s house, my hair is tripled with volume, beads of humidity sinking into my curls until my mane ripples.
When my sister and I sleep, we turn on the AC unit that’s only our special privilege for the first few hours of the night. When it shuts off at three a.m., our blankets slowly make their way to the floor and we sprawl out in twin starfish shapes. Maybe if our bodies are stretched to their widest points, the heat will take longer to crawl across us. When I open the door in the morning, the wetness of the air congeals into a solid arm of heat, slapping me across the face until I feel like choking.
I think we have descended from mermaids. That’s the only logical explanation I have for a people who live their whole lives wet. Who breathe through it while they ride their motorcycles, while they pile twelve people into a car meant for five, while they balance baskets of avocadoes and eggs and platanos on their heads and waltz through six lanes of traffic no more unbothered than if it was an open field.
I find my solace in small moments, in minute places where I can steal away some freshness and cool before the heat that runs into our core like magma rises up to claim me again.
1. When I get told to pick up the deliveryman’s bag of jumbo Presidentes, and I hold it tight between my chubby hands while I serve all the men lounging in plastic chairs on the street. The icy hardness of the bottle leaches through the black plastic, coursing down my arms in rivulets of glacial water. By the time I take it back inside and the music is echoing off the wood frames of Tata’s house, it’s lukewarm in my mouth as I take a sip.
2. When we’re driving to the campo, to see people whose names I don’t remember, to sleep in brightly colored wooden houses that creak and shift in mountain wind. On the highway careening towards the valley there are no lurking robbers, no street kids whose fast fingers can pry a phone through an open window. I can roll down the window and feel the ocean breeze fluttering against my cheeks like butterfly wings, like the butterflies on all the murals in Mami’s village, celebrating their warrior women.
3. When I slowly crawl up the metal spiral staircase to the roof of Tata’s house, taking each step with caution as it sways under me, its tremulous attachment to the concrete walls more ivy than metal. I swing my head under the electricity lines until I face the tallest branches of the mango tree. I don’t like the way mango tastes, stringy and syrupy sweet. But I like the way it smells under the branches, as the breeze spins sugar around me. The fading green to yellow surfaces of the heavy fruit weighing the branches down slide across my skin like silk. When I’ve leached the coolness from the breeze, I make sure to take a ripe mango with me as I start my trek downwards, rubbing it soft against my cheek, to give it to Mami so she won’t be mad for braving the broken stairs.
4. When I’m not really old enough to start going to bars, but I’m old enough to fake like I can. When I suck up rum and coke through a straw on my first night of real teenage freedom with my cousins, sitting under haphazardly strung up Christmas lights, gravel sinking into my feet where pieces have snuck into my sandals. There’s no heat inside me, only the pulsing steady warmth of Brugal, cinnamon and bite dancing down my throat.
5. When I go to the beach, to the water that’s more green than blue. When I can see the spines of dolphins in the distance, hiding in between frothy tips of white. When I dunk myself into the salty water all at once and there’s sleek currents of cool whipping past my face, sinking into my bones. The salt-water rockets in and out of my nose and then: my breathing is clear, ocean air seeping deep into my unblocked nostrils, cradling the depths of my lungs. Algae is caught in my hair like the sea is braiding it the way Mami does when it’s too much to manage. I float in aqua for hours. The sun streams into the water, bouncing off the crystalline edges. It settles into my chest but it doesn’t stifle me. Instead, it makes me glow.
When I leave the island shaped like a triceratops, with water flowing through the walls of every house and threaded into the air like ancient Taino tapestries, the heat stays with me. It scorches my hair, leaving it a yellow blond like coconut husks left in the sun. It darkens my skin. Most of all, it nestles in the space between my caramel skin and the veins that pump me full of my boiling blood. When I’m back home, I can feel it thrumming in my shoulders, on the crown of my head, in my cheeks. I can feel where it’s sunk into me like a second pulse.
