so then take me back if that place is it—
don’t hold my hands,
stifle this heart
still not finished beating
its deepest expressions of
solitude and unity.

Palma de coco, currincho, maní.

i tried to dance alone in my room and felt myself all wrong.
alma and soul are not the same word;
translation falls down terribly
when asked to speak of love.

my bones are cold,
knees frail and wanting.
let me move, hear me sing—
there is no word in English for gozar.

Mar, verde frito, mono selvático, mi amor.

i keep on trying to sink my bare feet into the crunchy, bitten grass
and wail in silence when i see me
go nowhere, be stagnant, when i
feel the hot sand further than before;
wonder was it ever near to me,
because does anything belong to?

Huir, hogar, profundísimo vacío, casa mía.

I am often asking myself what does and does not belong to me, what I can justly and honestly call mine. What is of me, what am I of? I am often wondering if, anyway, I ever wanted to be identified, to own or to belong. Wondering what my life would have been if I had never learned of something other. It’s a different thing to be told that you were born someplace and to feel that you belong to it, it to you.

I went to the town of Canoa, Ecuador for the first time when I was eight. I took my shoes off and I knew that that mud belonged with me, was of me, was me. I had three friends next door when I was ten and we played cops and robbers, threw sand, swallowed the ocean’s water. Once, we found a huge pit on a construction site and threw a length of bamboo across it. We spent hours balancing back and forth over the light-colored earth and sand below, sometimes falling, sometimes jumping or making it all the way across, victoriously, youthfully. Boasting scraped shins, telling the stories of reprimands we each received for coming home dirty and late.

JD was my first real kiss, and a good friend. I see those three childhood friends only very rarely, and we are strangers to each other. An hola without the memory of bonfires and twisted ankles, coca-cola and ritz crackers, oreos probably stolen. And this idea, this boundless possibility, of being a stranger to people I played with as a child, is beautiful to me because it seems at the very core of what makes a place feel like home. Meaning, I lived deeply enough that I can still walk a certain stretch of street or sand and feel that my memories of it and in it are far away but tangible.

Repollo made me a wedding ring out of thin strips of palm frond. Joao pulled my hair on the bus. Leito snuck bottles past my mama under the bougainvillea when we were teenagers. Emma was an utterly wild child and still my favorite friend carried in memory. We wrestled and ran and I swam past the break to save her from drowning. I walked her home through the salty- thick air (salitre) on a night during coastal Ecuador’s windy season (winter, there, and one of two seasons) before she left for Lithuania.

I’ve come to believe that home for me is the home of my mistakes, of old romances, of pain, of enemies, the most deep-rooted and ferocious of my love, the food that warms me up and cools me down and fills my soul with life’s good stuff. Home is the place I go to remember what the good stuff feels like. And no place has felt so much that way to me as Ecuador.

Joy Williams says, or quotes someone saying “home is not a place but a power”. In my mind home doesn’t have to stay, or speak, or wait. It only has to be. And my work is to open myself up to it—to that feeling, to that power. To hope for anything different would be to eternalize heartbreak, and to waste my blessed and ephemeral chances of being rooted, in everything and in nothing, waiting for a stability which I was born not to possess.

god who i do not know,
bathe me please with cold water.
street of dust, burn me, barefooted.
i want to sweat on mainstreet at three a.m.,
complain about the roosters, eat bolo
and laugh in the heat.
far away from me is the mango,
so far away the monkeys,
the throbbing night.
my legs ache to run there
where everything is left behind.
when i go back i’ll sit in the park with the birds,
the dogs, the chocolate shaved-ice con leche condensada.
when i go back i’ll be more grateful
for passion, for poverty, for hope, and faith…

In Ecuador we always have cold showers. You take a deep breath, step in, squirm underneath it, bathe quickly and gratefully. My very best friends, the ones I call sisters, live there. They carry hard-earned smiles, they brim with the smell of plantain peels and coastal salt.

The love of my life is bathing in the Santo Domingo river with her head thrown back, golden-breasted and glorious with the pain of her ancestors and mine nestled between her collarbones.