The Ocean, the Sea

I’m sitting on my uncle’s roof in Puerto Rico. To the north is the Atlantic Ocean, dark Prussian blue, immense, turbulent. To the south are the island’s leafy hills, rising and falling like silhouetted domes, like giant dunce caps with miles and miles of dense flowering vegetation sprawling in between. Palm trees dot the crests of the hills. Herds of sheep and cattle roam the small pastures down below. An owl calls out to me from a remote cave by the shore.

I wake up every morning to the tropical birds. Before I am fully awake, I linger in the soft terrain of sleep, listening to the tinkling stream of music that seeps into my dreams. The ribbon of sound loosely connects me to an outer reality, while I enjoy a couple moments languishing in the sweet unconscious. I hear the ocean lapping on the shore and my eyes open briefly. I catch sight of birds swooping from one rooftop to another. Then I step out on the deck and my face bathes in the warm, salty air. My imagination runs to the distant hills and to the hanging cliffs on the edge of the island.

The landscape has a lush, organic aliveness. The land is not cut up into sections and subsections like we’re used to in the United States. The palm trees along the shores, rain forests in the mountains and leafy hills all flow into a homogeneous web of tropical vegetation. From a distance, the figure of the island herself seems to be waiting, watching and listening for what you will do next.

On the neighbor’s roof, three construction workers drag iron rings over a metal beam. They wear jeans and ripped t-shirts and have cigarettes hanging from their dry mouths. They mutter in Spanish and laugh occasionally. The only noise on my uncle’s street comes from these men, which grows muffled by the broad, expanding ocean that swells behind their backs.

I go down to the beach. I observe the tide breaking on the shore, running up the sand and crawling backwards. I think about the girl I met two weeks ago and fell in love with. I think about my father and sister who called me yesterday. I think about the things I want to do when I get home from my vacation. I walk for fifteen minutes in one direction and then turn around. The tide has almost completely filled in my footprints. After only fifteen minutes, there is barely any trace of me; soon there will be none.

Everywhere I go I lay footprints. I am continually referring to my footprints, my thoughts, my impressions; because I believe these traces are me. If I tell you my thoughts, then you will know who I am. But how do I explain the tide of forgetfulness that perpetually erases who I tell you I am? How do I explain the vast sea of my unconscious?

Every morning, I wake up out of this vast sea. I go down to the beach. Whatever I’m thinking while I’m walking along the beach gets imprinted there, desires, hopes, anxieties, fantasies, problems. I try so hard to preserve my little footprints on the beach. I tend to my thoughts nearly every minute of the day. Regardless, the sea swells and overflows onto the beach. Thoughts dissolve. Problems lose their significance. Meanings change. The sea is constantly wearing away the edges of my conscious mind. The sea is perpetually running up the shores. I am just as much an absence and a forgetting as I am a personality and a recollection.

I look to the ocean and know that I am also that.

CRA

3/25/2007