Dear Dakota
“Only part of me worries, the other part doesn’t believe it.”
Wings of Desire
Dear Dakota
Everything is closing again. One night we’re all sitting by the malecon, sharing our old lives, guessing the ones to come, and the next we’ve all retreated into our solitary corners, alone, separate, tending the untouched skin, the silent air. I wonder, as many other writers have, which is the more aggressive of the two, the isolation, or the virus for whose sake we isolate?
I harbor a terrible, selfish impulse to say the hell with it all. But no, I can’t, for the elderly, for the ill, for the island with no hospital, for the people neglected by a callous government. I isolate for them, I keep far from the ones I want to study, to hold, and in keeping far, I feel as I am studying them closer, holding them tighter...
Dear Dakota
I met a man. I’ve only sat with him for a few hours, one evening, but my mind returns to him. Maybe it’s the hours and hours spent alone, maybe it’s a yearning trying to answer itself. It searches for a face in a crowd of solitudes, rests its gaze on a pretty one and says, yours will be the one I set right here, in this little hole in the corner of my chest. Because desire begs for shape, for skin, for features, for something to direct its private wars against.
I met a man who may or may not be sitting by a window or gazing at the sea, thinking to himself, I met a girl…
Dear Dakota
What wouldn’t I do for an hour in you? Each time I see a white van passing, I think of you. You pulled me out of the deepest agony, the worst of hells I’ve passed through. You came with me, through Florida, across Georgia, into Tennessee, over the hills of Virginia, and finally, to the place I swore I’d never return to. It is yours too, this city that has followed me around the world for years, and which, has, at last, left me alone.
I am free Dakota. We are free.
Dear Dakota,
You have given me freedom and I have traveled with it here, to this island of wild horses and untouched acres where I learn from the others who are free too— the horses, the roosters, the chickens, the dogs. Sometimes, our freedoms touch, other times, they remain separate, distantly observant, careful, admiring. Like you Dakota, they are teaching me how to be free. They come to me when they choose, go as they please. They carry their bodies with ease, with grace and a sort of nativeness that can only happen when the body and soul are in harmony. All the horses here, without reins, without owner — as if to tell me, you too can be without reins, without owner...
Dear Dakota
I will return. Or I won’t. I do not know. I am following the course you’ve helped me begin, and I don’t know where it will take me, how long I’ll be gone. I want the sea and the solitude. I want the city and its people. I want to brush shoulders with a passing stranger, want to stand beside an unmasked child in a train. I want to sit on a sidewalk with ice cream, play with time in a diner out in the middle of nowhere. I want to touch a door, a window, a chair. I want to pass a joint under a tree, walk into a cinema, lose myself in a world, not ours, but one we knew… one we’ll know again someday...
Dear Dakota,
I understand now.
I know why I no longer believe in the poet in me. I saw her rage, her hurt. I saw her without harness. She was wild, frightening, hurtful. And in her pain, her pain that was no longer something she could tidy up in a sentence, a poem, she made herself the source of pain to another. I cannot not forgive her, or she cannot forgive me. I can’t tell which of us carried the hurt, which of us discarded it in the body of another. But in witnessing the monster in me, I lost faith in the poet that was once there—beside her, under her, in her. It will take time for me to believe in her again.
I, who used to swear by the healing powers of poetry, have been the cause of someone else’s breaking apart. What right do I have in its sacred space? How can I pen a lullaby for somebody else’s pain while I have, with the same pair of hands, penned the greatest pain and the greatest tragedy?
To believe in the poet in me is to accept both the monster and the poet, the wounded half, and the other half trying desperately to mend it…
Dear Dakota
Forgive me, for leaving, for taking… for wanting you, and the island where I cannot have you. Here, I gather all of me, the one who has yelled and broken plates and pushed a man I love, the one who sets a little plate by the stairs with milk for the stray cats, who feeds the wild rooster in the morning, who wants to be loved by a horse. I am the one who has said awful things to the love of my life, and the one who has held his face in his sleep and whispered the gentlest words in his ears. I have run my thumb over his cheek, touched his beautiful lashes, and I have cursed him, hated him. I have traveled across the world to be with him, and I have traveled the other way around to be far from him. I have held him in arrival, and I’ve held him in departure. I am both the train arriving late, and the one departing before its time. I am I, and the one I cannot stand being.
Forgive me Dakota for not learning how to stay with something dear and precious, for the urge to leave, and the urge (that is slowly gaining power) to stay.
Vieques Natives
