Dental work is what I went home for, for nearly a month. In this month of March. What I went home to do. Sort of. I'll be 25 this June, so my mother's much more expansive health insurance than mine will expire in its application to, coverage of my broke-ass (are you all aware of how bad our dental insurance is? Holy God, I didn't know how nearly worthless it is until I had to deal with a succession of dental procedures, some of which are not worth using our ‘coverage' for, at least in my situation, and most of which our coverage does not cover...). I also had not seen my father for about 15 months. With the exception of a brief lunch date the day before a trip to Cuba last May that left him, well, worried about my political, social ‘sympathies,' ‘leanings,' drives and affiliations. During which I had to subtly remind him that while I may be inclined toward risky propositions, if they are worthwhile beyond a short-term angle of vision, I am not drawn toward, like, breaking laws, inclined to embark upon what I would qualify as self-destructive acts. Though I think his concerns were then, are now, ideological, connected to his own personal and religious history that I have described in another article for this publication. There is a deep disappointment for him in thinking that I've lost my faith, am ambiguously Left, and don't conflate cynicism and criticism of this nation and its government and delusions of democracy with needing to move elsewhere-a classic conservative rejoinder articulated in poor form when said conservative is feeling a threatened and angered sensation coursing through veins when a liberal, or a non-conservative who is also far from the American concept of what is "liberal," attacks US policies, one of the divisions of powers, or some concept seemingly characteristic of the American people. This is done not because of a desire to defect or depart; the critique, or hypothesis is being initiated because the speaker, because I, have a stake in things here. But this is a man that doesn't function well talking directly about his emotions, hopes, failings. He bonds, if that is the best verb, through talking about politics, society, current events. Through the litany of things that he narrows in on, as granted available by conservative news sources, he is able to express his own frustrations, feelings, etc. A particular grid is required to follow, decode, understand his structure of emotion, performance of identity, intellect, connection to the happenings in this country that he thinks to be the best on this earth. This is also one of our ways of keeping in touch, as other things, parts of our life, elements of our family life are far too difficult to verbalize and debate or feel most of the time.

I also had not spent time with my brother in nearly that length of months. This December he underwent an elaborate surgery on his face. This came some three years after a wreck in a Camaro that sent him flipping an estimated 14 times across and over a drawbridge. Luckily, I guess, the eternal inertia of a cypress tree met his and the metal's motion and stopped the car from meeting the depths of Florida inter coastal. He flew out of the t-top. Broke his nose in the launch. But, otherwise, stood up, checked himself out to discover a few scratches, walked away from the shoals there that marked his fate differently than his friend's, the driver's, than it might have. He jokes now about having once flown, though he was not sober enough to remember the flight as well as the landing. Between that and a couple surfing accidents, some brawls in his military stint, there were almost six hours of surgical damage that none of us could see, had anticipated before going under the knife. That the plastic surgeon didn't see or know of entirely until he had lifted my brother's face, skin, off. So his face is different. I miss his other nose, I must say. His nostrils. I found myself staring fixed at his nostrils sometimes. Weird, I know this sounds weird, but it couldn't be helped. They're different now. Not like mine, my sister's, mom's or dad's, not like his own, yet these are his own. As we paddled out toward a distant break of waves one afternoon within my near-tenure of a visitation, I noticed how much weight he'd lost. He's an even 6 feet tall, but has no body fat at all after this surgery. Weighs in around 125. Looks like someone else from certain angles.

The amount of pollution and tar streaked along the south Florida coastline is startling, disgusting. My family is strewn along the east coast of south and central Florida, from Miami to Cocoa Beach, some 300 miles, so while I saw, have seen, many changes, different kinds of erosion that are "natural" and others that are the result of the rapid and thoughtless construction of condominiums at varying heights, the presence of tar, heavy or light, and clusters of improperly disposed matter, plastic and clothes and this and that, are a constant theme whether on South Beach or Melbourne Beach. There's supposedly a site out in the Pacific where a swirl of thousands of pounds of waste have accumulated over time. Indeed, pollution, dumping seems to be something that calls for multiple interventions, including the recent decree by the Pope that mistreatment of the earth is a contemporary sin. But of many litter combinations entangled in sea weed and hanging almost decoratively in sea grape, the Cuban water bottle stopped my walk along the beach early one Saturday morning. Mom, look, that's from Cuba. It's bottled in Santiago-you can only buy it in Cuba. Maybe there's an SOS message in it. Or maybe some refugees were just here, she said, half joking in a characteristic mode of Cuban humor. Though there were no other balsero signs of life. The Cuban water bottle, Ciego Montero, and the series of footprints in the sand around it, brought on this vision, this dream, illusion as I looked back out to sea from Palm Beach's ostentatiously waspy-wealthy island, onto seas which had calmed almost entirely since the waves and storms of the week before. I imagined thousands and thousands of Cubans coming to shore. Invading the shoreline. Not on rafts, fragments of houses and tubes and tires, but on huge wooden ships, like what you imagine Ulysses' ship may have been like as he invaded Troy, and then as he left Troy, thinking he'd return to Ithaca before he was an old man. Increasing in nearness from the horizon. The bows growing more threatening as they nosed through the distance. The length of the ships lengthening, the number of paddles growing incalculably. Drawing closer. Anchoring. Then leaping over the sides of the ships, charging toward the shore, dressed like today, thousands of people. I don't know if Ulysses was on my mind because I have been reading the Martinican poet, Edouard Glissant, specifically his usage of this image of Ulysses as something like the Caribbean poet, like he who, tied to the mast of his ship like an island, must resist the siren's call by hearing it, seeing it, feeling it bound, while the crew, the rest cannot be susceptible to it as it happens but only know it, experience it in Ulysses', the captain's, the poet's retelling. Or if this surged to mind because Ulysses, and Cuba, have become markers of, metaphors for the or an exilic condition. Though it was exhilarating, and silly, the vision also terrified me. As it also conjured the image of Cuba as another Caribbean ghost-town-island, not only yet another diasporic nation-it already is that-, or one where capitalism's cold, hard hands have a grip-it is, also, already that-but one empty of its own people, as in ones concerned with a lived concept of national independence, sovereignty, economic viability, social justice, historical justice, a future that aspires to reconstruct certain ideals, hopes, frustrations, but instead a place filled with tourists, sunbathers, searchers for the exotic, US and European entrepreneurs, hotel builders, short-sightedly greedy capitalist pirates of much more than the Caribbean; this strand of thought makes me sick. Viscerally upset. Intellectually disturbed. Historically frustrated. Maybe this warrior image is one I formed in resistance to this other defeated, raped, prostrate, humbled island-people image. Perhaps it formed because it already exists. A Cuba that is not only holding fort, holding what it's got, sandbagging against the US's interests by allowing increasing investments from Spaniards and Italians, but one that is, has been, will continue to invade this nation's falsely secure images and ideals of its own democracy, goodness, fairness in its treatments of other nations and peoples within and outside of its borders. Perhaps I like this image in a way that I like the one the media creates about the Mexican border as a porous site where throngs of people are just walking across for the unthinkable, incomprehensible, audacious need of employment, to live, that therefore must be cemented shut, erected without holes, though we know that this is also a rejection of an internal and "legitimately" documented population of citizen-others who threaten static conservative positions of who belongs, what borders are, how foreign policies do and do not work. We walked on. I walked on out of my vision. Does it taste good, my mother asked. What? The water, does it taste good? Claro que sí, I said, with a smile. You're just saying that, she said inside of a small laugh. Mom, I ate very badly, and hardly, sometimes when I was in Cuba, and I was eating at the finest places possible. I can attempt objectivity on the subject... Right, just like I can, she said with the residue of the laugh having become a smile. I left the bottle in the sand. I usually pick up a few littered particles as I walk. I didn't care. I wasn't objective then. And I sinned; I assisted in polluting the earth. I want it to stay, fossilize. Turn into a monument. Not a necessarily beneficial development. But something I like to see in my mind, like I like to see Martí in Central Park.

On another morning walk, what is now in my memory the sand castle boy shocked me. Kids, I notice in my walks along the beach, seem to be making much more sophisticated sand castles than I ever did. I didn't really like the activity as a child because it led to this strange, caked mass of sand in your bathing suit bottom, rubbing against your ass. I was puzzled by kids who could just run around like that. Continue along like there wasn't a giant sand-turd hanging there. Anyways, the more sensitive ones of us had to walk down into the water and baptize well and discreetly enough to not give away the fact that one was doing this funny-butt-dance to get the sand out. Anyways, so this boy, about 8, with very advanced tools, far more advanced than my palm and plastic shovel combo, says to his friend as they're digging deep and fortifying a mote-a necessary element to any worthwhile sand castle: "We have to make it extra deep to keep the terrorists out. Yeah, cause the terrorists can come in from the ground, too, not just in planes. They're jealous of our city, all the people in our city... That's why they'll attack us." His 8 year-old voice faded as I kept walking to keep up with my miniature schnauzer. It's amazing how effectively spread, permeating the language of terror is. Elementary school kids are spitting it out with the same lack of nuance, understanding, echoed violence of pundits. I thought about letting Albert, my dog, loose on the thing, the kid and his castle. He, contrary to what this little boy might have been imagining, can be a true terrorist. A charmer who can quickly become a destroyer. I also thought of launching a few jellyfish into his chasm of a mote. There are hundreds along the shore this time of year. There's another radical invader for him. Don't get me wrong, radical Islam, or radical anything that becomes violent, something evolving as a way of thought and action that is arguably against human life, is not unthreatening or unreal. But the rhetoric of terror, as it trickles down into the exchanges and worries or jokes of children, children building sand-cities, sand-castles, sand-empires, is also harmful, misleading, and something arguably against human life.

The second day that Andrew, my brother, and I made our way out into the ocean, the sets and breaks had grown much heavier, higher. It was an "epic" day, as they say. About 8 feet over head at low tide. Not having the upper body strength that he has even after intensive post-op weight loss, I made it through the successive and pulverizing breaks at a much slower pace. He paddled out in around 15 minutes. It took me half an hour. Duck-diving is not my strong-suit being the not-even weekend surfer that I am (ok, I'm practically a kook, but know the rules, modes of politeness, what not to do in the water, so I'm not a certified kook except in my own occasional slip from form, which is to say, for every 8 waves I try to catch, I ride, like, one of them), so I kept getting banged backward after a little bit of headway had been made. Felt like I was internally drowning. Eyeballs burned with the salt water. Began to cramp in my left shoulder (I have a torn rotator cuff and some scar tissue in there). At some point, as I watched my brother and his girlfriend and their friend Ben, who has inherited a condo right on the water and near one of the more decent and consistent breaks in south Florida's otherwise comparatively shitty surfing conditions, and catching waves, gliding down and up and hopping off when desired, I thought to myself, what the hell am I doing out here? I have things to read. I have to write. And this is not fun for me right now because this shit is not only huge, but erratic-some waves were lefts, others rights, some would start and then one would come across from the other direction and derail the movement in a smack-, erratic in a way that I can't follow, am not reading well, quickly, as they are. Saying, fuck it, to myself, I began to paddle in. Caught one wave, loved the falling then propelling, flying sensation while it lasted, and thereafter rode the turbulent shore break on my belly and board until meeting the sand. Happily. I took off my wetsuit. Rinsed off with the beachside hose and made my way into Ben's apartment. Took a warm shower. Made coffee. And sat with his fat cat with a major under bite, so major that his tongue perpetually hangs out, on a sofa facing east, a terrace, sea grape, sand, then ocean, infinite until that break. He's sweet, Hercules, the cat, though he appears mentally underdeveloped because of the tongue thing. It was the one time in my life that I haven't had a book in my purse. I expected I'd get high and then surf the whole afternoon, so reading wasn't at all in the cards. But I had hawked this really old collection of short stories by Cervantes on the kitchen table as I walked in, which I grabbed and began to finger through as the goose bumps finally faded from my legs. I sat looking down at this collection that I've never read before and occasionally looking out the window, scanning the gray and blue to find black suits and Andy's bright yellow shorts. The three had drifted way up shore, north, but I could catch them out of the far left of the glass. I mused at what a dork I am as I sat much happier with a book than when out there, on a wet force that I otherwise miss, love, prefer to hear crashing, I guess, than feel crashing onto me. I'm not going to make some ridiculous comparative remark about how, while surfing an excellent wave is one of the most invigorating things one could experience, that it is sensual and wild and, a simultaneous experience in control, balance, and a realization of one's finitude, lack, that reading, cuddling up with a good story, now that is just a sensory experience like no other... Because that's a ridiculous juxtaposition of feelings that serves no purpose. And it's not true. But when my brother came in about half an hour later, shivering, giddy as this was the first day he had surfed since his surgery several months ago, he said he couldn't believe I left to read, and to read a book that wasn't even mine. It wasn't mocking, but sincere. He then began a telling excursus on how surfing is, for him, for his friends, a lifestyle. Kind of like becoming a better writer and poet, a "theorist"-he made the quotations with his pruned fingers-, well, a better person is for you. The others shivered in. Tried to warm up. And sat, after being out on the seas for almost two hours-what amazing stamina-and stared out the window at the breaks. Occasionally commenting on how this was like one day in Costa, or one day in the south of France, or at Sebastian, or wherever in Cali. I listened. Feeling like an intruder in their intimate conversation. They sat quiet, looking out, feeling sublime, maybe, content. I was restless. Though a lover of many coasts, I was eager to return to that riveted one of Glissant's: his poetry that marks itself on parchment in ways like the meeting of sea tide with sand, with tracings, dissipations, overwhelming winds and currents that remake the land. I was eager as I was holding the start of a poem in my head. I kept re-saying it to myself so that I wouldn't lose it, the strands of it that I held inside but needed to externalize almost desperately. The silence and fragments of sharing snippets of stories and my hovering over Cervantes half-heartedly came to a close as these surfers noted the time, the need to get to work, though arranging a time for the next day to head out together nearest to low tide as possible. I realized then how wrong I was, had been for a long time about my brother. Especially as I heard him say things simply about me that I don't do well saying simply at all. What I thought was an aspect, a part of him that somehow measured up to, amounted to a sedentary or lazy or "too laid back" mode of being was not that at all. It's not unrealistic, this desire of his to work, have the means to fund what for him is not a hobby, but a way of living close to his concept of nature, god, something exquisite, healthy, enlivening. It's not delusional to live and want, also, and more, something outside of the usual economic ordering of our lives, years, feelings, desires. It can be commendable, if not enviable for me as I am bound, from one perspective, to a certain logic of progress determined by the American Academy. Which is not something I lament; it is what it is. And the drug abuse that my brother's moved in and out of for someone so young is not an effect or a necessary part of this experience or lifestyle. That is a false cause and effect formulation made, cried out when we, my family, didn't really have insight to imagine the whys and wherefores differently, because we became complicit or irresponsible or insensitive alongside other thought-options. It is a far more complex reality that would take these lines in a direction that is not within this fragmentary piece's aims. But I was glad to hear him say, as much as I talk resistance and advise this or that to read or to think about, that he acknowledges the vulnerability and also the intensity of what I imagine myself to be doing on this earth.

So the dental work, when did this happen, one might be wondering. Since that was the mission governing the timing and length of this trip. Among other things, I experienced my first root canal. A terrible, terrible thing to go through. The cleaning process is violent. All sorts of metal devices are rip-roaring through a narrow spot. You're throbbing not with pain, yet, but with terror since any image forming in the mind is medieval, tortuous, and feeling guilty and stupid for even having to be there. Your mouth is stretched wider than one may have imagined it could stretch. There's water shooting in, and out, a chalky, burnt smell, rubber-gloved fingers probing, white interrogation lights bleeding through eyelids clamped shut. One eyelid is numb from the 3 or 4 Novocain shots so you feel like you might look The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Then comes the appointment for the temporary crown. Then the minimum fourteen-day wait for the permanent one. And finally, the last and fairly painless placement of the permanent crown. As I was lying on my back waiting for Dr. Korol to bring in the porcelain chunk that would become my tooth, I stuck my tongue up into the hole that used to be my tooth, felt the sad fragment of former tooth left, and then felt very bad. Not believing that I didn't act immediately when I learned of what was once a tiny blemish in my molar. Not believing that this hard sliver and gap is what's left of a perfectly good, well-meaning tooth. In the time that I stayed away from "home," had avoided encounters that are emotionally difficult because of historical experiences that we haven't worked through well as a family, as people, kept at bay visits that interrupt my work, my life, my tooth had rotted. It's a genetic thing. I have superlatively good dental hygiene, but I'm one of those people whose ph is off and so I'm just going to get cavities. But the family traumas that I avoid, that I like to think that I've thought through though many, many things linger at the limits of unhealthy repression, never forgetting, but an unwillingness to fight certain battles anymore, or right now, because I don't have the stamina or balls to do so, these have nothing to do with genetics. But everything to do with letting certain wounds stay unavoidably open; triaged in a way that avoids real practice, real confrontation with the possibilities and limitations of treatments. Everything to do with the fact that I let myself continue to think of so many aspects of this trip of "going home" like a visit to a site where I'll be probed, held under bright lights, forced to deal finally and really and painfully with the things that have been left to rot. So I've visited for this long-note that verb, I don't feel like I am at home, but that I'm visiting something like it, the closest thing to what it might be like right now-and spent as much time as possible reading for my oral exam lists, out on the ocean, arguing about elections, telling stories and jokes and discussing in vague but in the most appealing ways imaginable what I do, how I am, so on. Knowing that many things are hankering to be spoken, felt and handled. Knowing that I can put them off for a little longer. I have to have two wisdom teeth begging to be pulled, and the cuspate of a molar that I broke eating a Cuban radish to be crowned in the next two months.