no walls

I was standing on the second floor of a restaurant with no walls in Loiza. The ocean was dark; rolling white-noise oscilloscopes emerging from the silence of night, faint and gray, palpably fawning over the beach. The warmth of the sand complimented the warmth of the water. They danced, moving this way and that, in and out, together, apart, holding invisible hands.

I missed my children. I called my wife on our cell phone. The moon did a bad job of hiding behind a palm tree whose trunk was in arms length but whose palms were in space above the ocean. I thought of Christmas, St. Nicolas' Day in Lawrence, Kansas. White snow on a brown earth. I was a little drunk.

Memory is heavy like El Morro, perched on the edge of the world, the precipice of what I've learned up to this point. The implications of such memory are heavy and dark like El Morro's shadows. People I know and people I don't know pass through them, are heavy like shadow and then light, like air. It is a golden sun with a jealous blue sky. A vast battlefield separates us from the past.