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That’s the Panamá I want to hold on to. Because a place can do many things against you, and if it’s your home or if it was your home at one time, you still love it. That’s how it works.
The truth was that I didn’t know which I was. I wasn’t allowed to claim the thing I felt and I didn’t feel the thing I was supposed to claim.
And I think we all sensed, standing there, just how far we were from where we had come, in ways both good and bad. “It’s beautiful,” my mom said, staring out at the ocean. She sighed and shook her head. “This country.”
“No one else,” Arturo used to say to me, “has ever been in love like we are. No one else even understands what that word means.” We believed we were special. We believed we were indestructible.
And then, the rush. It was as if the whole world sighed. As if every human and every creature and every gas and liquid and speck of dirt and granule of sand and gust of air settled all at once, and all was right in the universe. If only for that moment.
every day pouring cupfuls of water into the pots that held his plants, turning them in the sunlight, taking care of them because she thought it was a way of taking care of him.
there is more. And you will find it.
But that’s what makes it so exciting, no? That’s what keeps me going. The possibility.
I went to him and put my hand on his shoulder with all the tenderness I possessed. I wanted to heal him somehow with my touch,
You think I don’t breathe you and dream you every single day of my life? You think I haven’t been inside you?
I saw that humans are no better than any animal or brute, and in many cases might be infinitely worse.
Life got its tentacles around you, its hooks into your heart, and suddenly you come awake as if for the first time, and you are standing in a part of the town where the air is sweet—your face flushed, your chest thumping, your stomach a planet, your heart a planet, your every organ a separate planet, all of it of a piece though the pieces turn separately, O silent indications of the inevitable, as among the natural restraints of winter and good sense, life blows you apart in her arms.
We’re the unknown Americans, the ones no one even wants to know, because they’ve been told they’re supposed to be scared of us and because maybe if they did take the time to get to know us, they might realize that we’re not that bad, maybe even that we’re a lot like them. And who would they hate then?
