I remember when I left San Juan, walking around the night before catching the plane, the night before Christmas, December 23, in shorts and a t-shirt at 2 in the morning. San Juan, Cuba, Miami – those are the climates of my heart. And when my girlfriend picked me up in San Francisco, I was sad, so sad, to be back in grey country, with grey and beige houses, black and blue clothes, grey and black sky. The grey people walked fast, they had places to go, sorry, no time to socialize, no time to smile. So some part of me will always miss a land where fruit is sold by a truck parked half on the sidewalk, half on the street, where “my love” is a part of everyday speech and bank tellers call you “darling, my heart”. I want to live in a country where music blares from open air cafes, and the people you see inside (if you, like i were too timid to go in and watched, hungry, the cafes from afar), the people inside dance, drink, gesticulate and talk, all clothed, like their houses and stores are painted, in yellow, and pink, blue, and red, the same bright colors of the heart, the heart that the gas station attendants invoke while they wait on you, though bored, and unseeing, it’s an incantation if casual, an everyday prayer. My Rabbi says that what you practice is what you will become, so you had better practice what you want to be and we want EXPLOSION, we Latinos, - curse me for stereotyping but I guess even the most refined and light skinned of us worship the fire goddess deep down inside. So I practice, becoming, an everyday flame of “mi corazon”, my heart, my daily, painful, pulsating, heart. Puerto Rico wears that heart on it’s pink and yellow sleeve, as do I, as I do.
 
  Tonight, walking, tending the cats and searching the dumpsters in my apartment complex for treasures, I realized it was eleven at night and I didn’t need a sweater. It’s July twelfth and San Jose has a ghost of that feeling I love, it has it’s own spirit, too, but tonight we’re talking of heart. Almost like San Juan, I thought, turning into my own place with just a whisper of chill. Almost San Juan, mi querido corazon, just, not, quite.
 
 
 
 
copyright, 2002, M. Sachs Martin