What a great year! Worthy of being in VH1’s “Best Year Ever” episode. I got promoted at work, bathed in 9 different beaches, become closer with my family, closer with friends, and received the gift of creating life: my little lady, Seanna Sofia.
She’s so beautiful. So adorable. So gentle. Tender and sweet. Just like the flesh that made her and carried her in her womb. I love how she smiles in her sleep, how she opens her mouth wide and closes her eyes when she yawns, how she makes sounds like a kitten when she cries — But I’m getting ahead of myself.
So let me start with the first day, January 1, 2009. Man, what a party! What a crazy youth-spirited reckless night! What loss of control, what disregard for the norm of society. It was fun. To be careless one last time. To sing along songs, out loud; to dance like a high schooler, raising a glass of champagne to love and life, and bring in the new year one last time without second thoughts, toasting along friends and my beloved Monica. Aniceto and Jose, Primo Productions, you are to blame for such madness. And that was it. No more partying like a rockstar. We felt that it was not for us anymore.
As far as getting the new year started, Bianca, Monica and I went snowboarding and man it was about 75% torture and 25% fun. We ended up on the ground so many times that I felt I had bursted an instestine. We hit the ground so hard so many times that even though we had gotten the “All Day” pass until 10PM, by 5PM we couldn’t get up anymore. When we fell, it took us a good 5 minutes of just laying there, motionless, groaning, gathering strength to get back up. The problem was that when we went, even though it was cold, it wasn’t snowing. Instead of snow, there was ice on the slopes. It was basically trying to snowboard on frozen concrete. Looking back, I don’t think it was the determination to master the bunny slope that kept us there, it was plain masochism. This was just plain painful. I wish we could have made it to the regular “grown up” slope though, but we’ll shamefully admit that the Bunny Slope punished us so bad we got scared. After we left, Bianca looked like she had gotten in bar brawl, Monica looked like she had married a wifebeater, and I, well, I still looked good.
In February, we visited our good friends Yazmine and JP in Puerto Rico. We really enjoyed our stay with them and got to visit different parts of the island. I had many times seen the sun at sunset, but never actually sat down to contemplate it and enjoy it. When we visited Dorado, we did exactly that. And it was beautiful. It was an orange reddish circle with a soothing glow, slowly being swallowed by the dark sea and the endless dance of the waves. I wrote about this beautiful experience here. We also got to visit hidden coastlines and experience Puerto Rico underwater; we went Scuba diving in La Parguera, a diving spot where you can supposedly spot whale sharks during their migration. Unfortunately, we were a day late. The guides said they had seen a 40 foot whale shark the day before. What a disappointment Puerto Rico was a lot of fun and its waters hold a special place in our heart since that’s where Seanna’s nickname “Sirena” came from. I was going to write about our scuba diving experience but didn’t get to it because Monica surprised me with the news that she was with child. I won’t be able to finish the second half of our Puerto Rico experience, but below are some videos and pictures we took of our dive trip. Although it was nice and full of corals, we were disappointed that there were very little fish. Weird.
Video of Scuba diving. From getting into the water, diving to bottom, seeing the “wall of corals”, to getting back on boat:
Although it was not always the case, rain had a peculiar way of changing my mood. It would bring a certain melancholy mixed with a hint of nostalgia and it would bring upon me an indistinct sadness that I carried with me like a rotten bag of potatoes over my shoulders. At times, this sadness, this vague loneliness would seep into my being like drops falling into an empty jar, somewhere in the darkness echoing regrets and past wounds. It was raining in paradise tonight. It was raining hard, with drops that hurt and were like small relentless darts piercing the ground. But tonight, oh tonight that jar that was hidden in the depths of my private solitude, that jar that was always thirsty for the melancholy and sadness was filled with the love of her breath, the warmth of her body and with each kiss, each splendid “I love you” sadness packed up and took it’s cold torturous hands, once used to chilling even my bones, and left. This was our first rainy night as a married couple and I, for the first time, felt whole when it rained.
It was a night tempered by furious winds from the sea and lighting streaks across the dark sky. The sound of the rain was fighting a losing battle with the sound of thunder rolling from one side of the punished island to the other. If the clouds were God’s wooden floors, then that night He was moving furniture around; that’s how the stern, harsh sound of rolling thunder sounded. We would be awakened by the recurring thunderclap that sounded like shattering crystals across the infinite sky. We could hear objects of all kinds flapping, pieces banging into the thinning palm trees which were fighting the heavy winds. I was more at peace than Monica. She was freaking out. Any major roar in the sky from thunder and she would twitch in her sleep.
In case you didn’t notice on the previous video I posted earlier, our love shack doesn’t have any lock, so essentially any one could at any point walk right in. As we were sleeping, Monica whimpered silently with fear. She made that sound that a frightened child would make. Her breathing increased exponentially, it felt as raging as the wind outside, but instead of the furious breathing of the sea, it was a breathing that cried of desperation. And then she made that sound: It was a genuine, gut-filled, blood rushing, breath-taking, my-life-is-flashing-before-my-eyes type of panicked shriek! She was wide awake, almost crying. “What’s wrong,” I urgently asked. “Someone is grabbing my feet!” she exclaimed panic-stricken. I searched in the darkness of the night for a silhouette of a perpetrator. And with all the wind that was angrily blowing through our love shack, the waves hammering the sand, the flapping of the leaves from the palm trees, the thunderclap, the lightning and the torrential rains this was a perfect setting for a horror movie. I narrowed my eyes and saw no movement by the door, no shadows among the shadows. Then a flash of lightning revealed nothing. I asked Monica if she wanted me to turn the light on. She whimpered again. My hand reached slowly towards the light and I felt Monica hold her breath in suspense, as if waiting to scream in terror. If this was a movie, there would have been that ominous sound of a violin or Psycho theme soundtrack as the camera focused on my hand slowly turning the light on and then it would have focus on her fear-gripped eyes as she hid her lower face behind the covers waiting to see the midnight foot masseuse at her feet.
And as you might have guessed it, it was nothing. I explained to her that the chances that a man was going to cross the jungle in the middle of the night, during a raging storm, only to come and give her a foot massage was very rare, almost next to impossible, and that that man would only be me. I must admit that she does have nice feet, but c’mon. As it turns out, luckily for her, her midnight foot masseuse happen to be me anyways. Well, sort of. You see, every time there was a loud thunderclap, Monica would twitch. It was like an automatic reaction or reflex. So, I thought she was having a nightmare, and like any loving husband, I moved closer to her and with my lonely feet caressed her tiny feet. I was only seeking to comfort her, to shield her from her own dreams. Little did I know this simple action of love was going to make us feel as if we were about to star in our own (very fake) horror movie sketch. After laughing about it, we went back to sleep with the soundtrack of nature’s rage.
After another black starless night of running to the throne (read previous post), this time under tempered winds and thick drops of rain, we woke up late. We were supposed to be at Dolphin’s Dive Shop at 830 for the first dive. The sun and the chickens were already out, Derek’s two kids were playing and somewhere nearby someone was chopping coconuts with a machete. The waves were breaking and the ocean was breathing a mellow breeze. Ahhh, the soundtrack of paradise made you feel lazy and getting out of bed became tough. I was feeling much better. It was 815 in the morning and we weren’t going to make it to the dive shop on time; crossing that jungle was going to take at least a half hour, walking at regular speed but I was in no shape to walk at regular speed. Since we knew we were not going to make it to the first dive trip, we sat down and ate toast, pineapples, passion fruit juice and scrambled eggs. After hanging out and making small talk with Derek and Anna, we got ready to our trek across the jungle. We applied bug repellent lotion like it was moisturizing or sun tan lotion because we didn’t want to be shredded to pieces again.
We started on the trail yet again, and yet again we walked by the shacks and saw kids working the land. The poverty of the island took from this paradise that feeling that life is easy going here. It set in the harsh realities of the indigenous of the land, those that have inherited a paradise for tourists, those with the dollar, the euro, but not for their own children. They live in rusty tin shacks that are the size of two cubicles put together. Others live in rotten-wood homes. Most of the local, however, live in decent and very modest homes. I still cannot understand why there are more foreign business owners than native born. It’s as if the natives are being robbed out of their own land. Acre by acre, the land and businesses are going to more and more blue-eyed blondes paying 30 silver dollars at a time. But that’s capitalism and it’s fine, I just wish that I had seen more local business owners.
Anyways, when we reached the dive shop, the first divers had just returned from the first trip. “We saw dolphins!” they exclaimed. Ouch! The heartache! “They were playing, coming back and forth, about 10 feet from us!” they said in jubilance. They kept on talking about how fantastic it was and with each sentence, with each laughter, they were adding weight to my already sinking optimism that I would have the same chance. I knew that we weren’t going to go diving at the same spot. Talk about disappointment. Talk about regret! “I shouldn’t have eaten that fruit,” is all I kept thinking.
We got suited and climbed the boat. The bumping of the sea was making sick again. This was going to be our first dive in the open ocean so we were filled with excitement and anticipation. When we got to our destination spot, we sat on the edge of the boat and leaped backwards. And there, we went under listening to the Darth Vader breathing, wide eyed, watching hands signals and looking out for whatever may be lurking, camouflaged in the sand. The dive master that certified us always told us to be careful when going to the bottom of the sea, as there are creatures that use sand for cover, so stepping in the sand could be dangerous. Sure enough, as soon as we got to the bottom, some 35 feet below, the dive master was giving us the hand signal to watch out below, as there was a sting ray hidden in the sand. All you could see were two eyes and a menacing barb. Monica was paranoid of getting too close because she remembered Steve Irwin, the crocodile hunter who got killed when a stingray’s barb pierced his heart.
As soon as we dropped in the water, we were about to step on this stingray.
I got very close to this stingray and then reality shivered down my spine as I realize that this animal could kill me. We established buoyancy at another spot in the sand once we made sure there was no other danger of getting killed. Well, let me rephrase that, I established buoyancy. Monica, well, let’s just say that Michael, the dive master who certified us, wouldn’t have been proud. Actually, he would have cringe at how Monica was all over the place. She was floating up and down, swimming like a mermaid in distress, swinging her arms like a drowning man. I don’t know what happened, but there was no grace in her diving abilities. She was like an octopus fleeing from a vicious prey. Most of the time she was doing the “Running man” underwater rather than swimming horizontally.
One of the few moments when Monica was diving as she should, horizontally.
About five minutes into the dive, the dive master took us into a coral reef that was populated with an assortment of fish. And then I saw a shark. Then another. The dive master pointed it out to us and it swam by us and away from us. I scrambled for my camera, but couldn’t get it to work properly so I was only able to take the picture below. I tried to follow it, but it was too fast.
Our first Shark sighting. It swam away from us quickly.
Puerto Rico was a lot of fun and its waters hold a special place in our heart since that’s where Seanna’s nickname “Sirena” came from. I was going to write about our scuba diving experience but didn’t get to it because Monica surprised me with the news that she was with child. I won’t be able to finish the second half of our Puerto Rico experience, but below are some videos and pictures we took of our dive trip. Although it was nice and full of corals, we were disappointed that there were very little fish. Weird.
