All of the Sand in All of the Wind (Newsletter #1)
Good evening newsletter readers! Welcome to the frolic, segunda parte. This year’s edition features two (2!!!!!!!!) writers, myself and Dana. Please find our accounts below, and, as always, responds with questions, dudas, poetry, your own newsletters, and any such ephemera. Also note that there is a rap song at the end of this issue.
DANA (Newsletter #1)
Daily sunburn update: I reapplied face and body sunscreen multiple times. After my shower, Iwas relatively unscathed except for some splotchy blobs along my shoulders (I think the dampness of my bathing suit rubbed away my diligent efforts? I don’t know what to do?)
Other content:
I woke up at 5:20 am (Owen insisted it be that exact time because we wanted to make sure we had time for snacks) and then we ventured to the airport. I was disheveled and hungry as we waited, and my stomach sloshed with the full Nalgene I chugged in the security line. More and more Brown students congregated at the gate. It felt like a bad movie. A girl from my English class pulled the hood of her sweatshirt tight and took a nap in the leather seat. I made intense eye contact with a guy from my history class in sophomore year. On the plane, a girl from my urban studies class sophomore year sat directly behind me and broke the 4th wall (said hi to me) as we were unloading our things and deplaning. I couldn’t help but think that spring break in Puerto Rico would be just like the first spring day on the Main Green, only with sand and waves.
Immediately after we put our things in our air bnb, we had the BEST breakfast sandwiches and smoothies on the island (it had garlic mayo– the sandwich, not the smoothie). The beach was windy and sandy (as beaches often are), but we still tossed a frisbee. We swam in the warm water as algae tickled our toes, and sometimes, it felt like being tossed in a washing machine. My mother always taught me to have a healthy respect for the ocean. I was taken aback by the colors in the water, the turquoise and teal and navy. And its clearness. I think I understood how painters approached the impossibility of capturing the ocean.
And the boys said they experienced childlike wonder and joy as they splashed around and frolicked. Laura and I went on a walk with the three of them. We saw an itty bitty crab hiding beneath a twig. It scurried then paused. Jackson wanted to scoop it up in his hands, but I told him we can’t mess with nature.
We ate dinner in a piñata. You may think that is impossible or at least an exaggeration, but it is neither of those things. The facade of the taco joint was decorated with rainbow leather fringe, like a quintessential horse piñata, and each room of the interior was a different neon color. Some reviews (unclear if bots) declared that the vibe was “club-like.” Perhaps. They did make strong margaritas and a mean birria quesadilla, all for touristy prices despite some reviews indicating otherwise. Beneath the freezing air condition, we revealed truths from our lives before Brown. It’s crazy to think that we’ve only known each other for four years, to think that there was so much life lived before we melded. We shared awkward first kiss stories. One member of this group kissed in the back rows of the school bus in elementary school. Another member had their first kiss in front of their 6th grade class (don’t worry, it was just a peck). There was a bashfulness and timelessness to this conversation, to giggling and blushing and revealing. A closeness, despite and because of the distance from Providence, Rhode Island.
We walked home at night, the soft glow of the street lamps guiding the way. I studied the bars on the windows and the flowers that grew up and around them, tangled. The cats, skinny and skittish, emerged in the darkness. They hid under cars and behind trash cans, poking their pink noses out. I approached gently, palm extended. “Hola gatito.” I greeted each one. “Que preciosa.” I spoke Spanish to them, though they still ran away, sizing me up from beneath Jeeps and trucks. I didn’t pet any of them. They wouldn’t let me. But I was comforted by their presence and excited each time they scampered across the street.
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LAURA (Newsletter #1)
Dear friends, lovers, enemies, party-goers, fans, and frequenters of the Pantheon of Providence, Rhode Island,
In this second yearly edition of spring break communications, your beloved heroes and sunburnt frisbee friends leave the confines of their perilously windy, famously un-islandish island of origin, in hopes of finding another windy, but much more sandy, and infamously much more islandish-island-or-really-several-islands, Puerto Rico.
The perilous wind (what? edition two, drama was promised) follows our band of newsletter heroes all the way back to Friday night, when we were clown-carring ourselves into the back of Anjali’s Toyota in the dark, scratchy gravel of her driveway, stacking suitcase-duffle-bag dominoes with ourselves on top into the equally dark interior of her car. Once sufficiently sardined, we went careening down 95 toward Boston (not a flag on Anjali’s driving skills, but just an excellent vocabulary word) with early high school ballads on the aux, King Princess rudely crooning I love it when you try to save me.
We eventually croon our way into the suburbs of Boston, home to not one but two of our star travelers, where we accordingly split into two warm, sleepy households for the brief night; it’s already midnight when we arrive. At Nora’s, we’re greeted to a pair of picturesque cats, at least in theory — the orangeish Pan has already snuck away to sleep when we arrive, and instead we meet his brother Pico, a quiet, inquisitive little gray morsel of a cat, sweet, not unlike the chopped salsa he’s named for. Pico’s soft silence sends us off to bed too, searching for the shreds of rest we need. A restrained hush over the stubby candle of the day, and we all fall asleep, dreaming of Beantown.
The hush obliterates itself into a raging alarm sound, and BAM we’re up and snacking on banana bread BAM meeting the elusive orangey cat Pan over a carton of strawberries BAM finding Nora still asleep fifteen minutes past wakeup call BAM out the door. Friday night wasn’t our only bitter taste of Boston traffic, it turns out, and now we are treated to the roundabout, pitchy nature of Boston streets, a series of rotaries and intersections planned out to coalesce into some greater clarity, but which never do. (I’m sorry Boston, but we’re NEW YORK CITY people here, and faithful readers remember.) What is a true treat, however, is Nora’s mom’s perfectly tuned navigation to the airport, even at 6am on an overcast morning forecasting snow with a carful of drowsy college students. We make it to Logan, if only thirty minutes after our other halves did. They wait for us, grinning, and then run off for burritos and coffee. In a brief interlude, I sneak away to the Delta club and frown at someone sipping red wine at 7:15 in the morning. So intricate and strange the choices we decide to normalize, is what I’m thinking, as I am pouring my own espresso a few minutes later. Passengers swarm around the club clutching their on-demand hot coffees and cappuccinos and lattes, foaming at the mouth. Coffee gremlins. I then Frankenstein together an iced latte for myself — ice, hot espresso, more ice, oat milk, oops I forgot syrup, then vanilla syrup, grin because I have constructed my heart’s desire. Strange. I take the coffee and go.
What follows is the plane ride, which has been a continued subject of anxiety and trouble for the writer, lest she forget it in the delightful language of rephrasing her life into a story. It occurs something like this, to me. I stare straight ahead, holding my latte contraption in both hands. The ice inside is too much for the papery walls of a hot cup, and my fingers start to numb. The plane taxis, insistently, perpetually, until there must not be any taxiway remaining, and we’re still taxiing. Then the tubular machine we’re sitting in suddenly revs to life, whirring like an overheated computer when the 300th Google Chrome tab finally throws it off the cliff of functionality. The noise grows, and grows, and when it’s loud enough we shoot off like a kid’s bottle rocket, in the park, late July. We ascend. I hold Dana’s hand. We ascend. I let go of her hand and get busy attempting to sleep. We ascend. The pilot interrupts my fake sleeping with the announcement that we will be experiencing some rough air. We experience some rough air. I sleep in fits, letting the ice in my coffee melt. Now it is a monstrous iced Americano, instead, and all of my constructing has been for nothing. Some time passes, but very slowly, like dough moving through the metal precisions of a pasta machine, slicing into thin versions of itself, smaller and smaller, incrementing with an impossible relaxation, like time is infinitely elastic. At a certain point, I decide sleeping is no longer an option, and I play 2048, but only a single-digit quantity of times, while drinking my watery coffee concoction. I look back. Dana is sleeping. I ignore, methodically, the live flight-view on my seat partner’s screen, which attempts to convey what the captain is seeing out his front window. This is not a view I would ever like to see. I am not going into aviation. I eat the Sunchips and calm down. We descend. I remain calm. I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. The woman across the aisle is watching Dune. We descend. I do not particularly enjoy the turbulence. I stare straight ahead, because I am remaining calm. We descend. Maybe the coffee has kicked in but I feel like this every day. The plane wobbles and shakes across the finish line, and we glide across the runway to a stop in San Juan, the first fragment of land we’ve seen since we departed the artificial land of Boston’s airport. The plane has wobbled and shook its way to San Juan. At least, that’s what it feels like when the people in the back of the plane, surrounding me in my humble row 33, start to clap vigorously upon landing. I turn over that fact in my mind, unconvinced. The plane has landed. The clap fades to silence.
After this, we get off the airplane.
The San Juan Airport has cramped ceilings, aquamarine trim, and a corresponding swimming pool of tourists who swarm the gate we leave behind. Boston English fishtails into Spanish-first, at least over the loudspeaker, where a former Miss Universe welcomes us. We cross the sticky tile, snag Jackson’s bag, and wander out into an astonishing wall of heat. Waving palm trees. A waxy brightness that finds its way under your eyelids, sticking to the thin film of your corneas, burning. This is a beautiful, unwordly departure from cold nights in Providence. Anjali is wearing a white t-shirt with round, glossy oranges on the front, and they start to drip, cold and sweet and inviting.
We call a couple Ubers and exchange a mix of Spanish and English — mostly English — with the driver. This car ride marks the beginning of an unsteady odyssey of language, in which Bryce will emerge as our helmsman, his Spain-Spanish brewed in the pot with chilenismos, the most comfortable of us persisting in Spanish even when given English in response. I stare at the four-digit code on my phone. Cero-uno-cero-nueve. Should I say it in Spanish, even though he’s greeted us in English? He says something again, in English. We’re fresh tourists, already burnt from the scathing airport air. Zero-one-zero-nine, I say, or decide, and then we speed off.
After open highways and sun-breezy access roads, the driver drops us off at the end of a winding spool of narrow streets, with buildings in green, turquoise, indigo, deep blue crowded over the sidewalks, tilting forward as if intoxicated, always on the balls of their feet ready to fall into a graceful swan dive. Our own apartment is part-ocean-blue, part-peeling-white, with a series of white grated gates between the road and the interior. A little courtyard and outdoor shower funnel into a spindly staircase, past an uncertain side balcony which looks like it’s meant to be occupied by things, not people, and then through a shaky metal door — our new home. Last newsletter, we hurried around between sleeping situations and piles of pillows and questionable wall art; this time, we settle into one place for six days, a grayish tiled two-bedroom home, with a kitchen and sitting room sandwiched between them. Icy A/C blasts over the bedrooms, but not the common areas. The girls are lucky — our bedroom connects to an adjacent balcony, glancing over the street we just summitted.
We’ll explore the AirBnB more later., because we rush out the door, fast as we can drag everyone, straight for the recommendation of our host, Pinky’s, a sandwich and breakfast joint only a five-minute walk away, with a glowing list of five-dollar smoothies, too. Pinky’s is both an appropriately aggressive pink color, on wall and decoration both, in addition to being patron of the most disturbing mascot choice in Puerto Rico, a standing, naked baby, on the wall, on the menu, online. Is this Pinky? Did Pinky make us these sandwiches with fried eggs, melting cheddar cheese, and thick slices of ham? Did he make us these tangy orange smoothies with his tiny baby hands? We snatch the food from the mouth of this black-and-white photo and run straight to the beach.
Only a block away, the ocean hides behind a handful of palm trees, a grassy cluster of green matter and moss and bushes, and then a loping landscape of SAND. The ocean is a light glossy blue, perfectly shimmery, enticing and dotted with kite surfers whose sails stamp the sky like little multicolored macaroni. But the SAND. I attempt to ignore it as we settle down, delighted, unwrapping the sandwiches from foil and laughing incredulously at where we were now, so incredibly far from gray Boston streets. I attempt to ignore the sand as I bite down on the aforementioned hot cheesy sandwich, gut-hungry. But the sand does not ignore me. It whips down the beach, one million miles an hour, and attempts to eat my sandwich before I do. It flits under my sunglasses and inside and under my eyes, beneath the straps of my swimming suit and into my mouth, between the grooves of my teeth. The sand is a violent, wrecking force, alive and hungry, and when it picks up off the strip of the beach, it travels for miles, unrelenting, until it finds something to stick to for good. Fine-grained sand starts to coat our skin, our exposed necks and arms and stomachs — but just me and Dana, seemingly no one else. Was it too much sunscreen? Sticky skin? Will it still protect us from sunburn? I want to ask the sand these questions, but it races by in the hot wind, going other places but here.
I eat my sand-wich, which is now much more its first half than its second. I imagine that the beach wraps around the whole island like a yard of ribbon, tight around its spool. The people kitesurfing jump into the air, knees crunching, and soar for a moment before gliding out onto the waves where the wind pushes them, a forceful westward shove. The sandwich also crunches. Could the kitesurfers surf around the entire island? They seem to drift dozens of yards with each leap. We grin at the beach, and then each other. And then we pick up a frisbee. (Hey, we lasted half an hour.) The wind rattles us, but only a bit, and we only almost hit another beachgoer once, and only almost. Our upwind flicks and backhands improve steadily. Eventually, the girls run for the water, but it smashes back as violent as the persistent sandy wind, and only Dana is brave enough to float out at a distance, bobbing so far out we can only see her head over the waves. And her bob. Fuck ass bob.
At some point, some people are eating snacks. Crunchy, salty, savory chips. I eat one (1) salt and vinegar chip, and it sets me back an entire Nalgene of lukewarm tap water. I look up at the sky, a hypnotic teal. So thirsty, I could drink it, scoop it out with a bowl and eat solid chunks, suck on them like crystallized ice cubes. Cold ice. We talk about ice-nine, the fictional substance that turns the world into itself, a stabilized form of ice which never melts, ever, and anything it touches turns to ice-nine too. I start to think the torrid, sandy wind of San Juan is like ice-nine, turning everything it touches to pure scratchy heat, boiling up the ocean and melting the sand and my skin and my plasticky bathing suit down into a pure glass, the stable temperature of the sun. Anjali tells me, later, that the only thing necessary to measure the temperature of a planet should be the temperature of the sun, and its distance from the planet. But it’s not enough, she says, emphatic. I am too hot to say much, so I open another Nalgene, someone else’s, and nearly drain it. It’s hot too. Are we talking about dream jobs? Anj tells us, she does not dream of labor. I touch the ground, which is already ice-nine, which touches me, who is already ice-nine. The heat ripples to us all, and eventually we scuffle, scramble. We go home? All I can think about is the water at home. I follow Nora back.
On the way home, stiffer and saltier than before, we dodge across those same narrow sidewalks pressed between those same multicolored houses, but this time, without the cast of sunlight, their colors grow mute. They become upright, cagey façades, their bars and thin metal doors whistling and snapping in the island wind, giving the impression that some hasty spirit is rattling them. Metal shakes, in San Juan. At home, the metal door to our apartment shakes with phantom knocks every few minutes, and the metal roof makes a noise like a shattering every time a sporadic rainstorm drifts over the island. The first time this happens is in the middle of the restless first night, and it wakes me, sudden. On the streets, I glance over the license plates, with some nonsensical subliminal expectation that I’ll see a familiar one from one of fifty states — but of course there are none, and the notion of a wire-thin bridge wending from the tip of Florida to the grainy beaches here is unfathomable. All of the license plates say Puerto Rico, and most of them say “Isla de Encanto”. Nora says she thinks it means enchantment, like charm, like beauty, not a magic spell. Some of them say “Make-a-Wish,” like the foundation, and I stare at them, uncomprehending.
After we remove the onion-layer of sands which has accumulated — this is a multistep process, involving an outdoor shower, a period of baking in the balcony sun, and an indoor cold shower — we put on dresses and venture out for tacos. Tacos??????? I know, readers. Not a Puertorican food. Please direct your disappointment and shame to us all. The taco place, however, is just around the block, with margaritas, and birria, and it is also decorated like an enormous piñata, though we didn’t know this until we arrived. Well, a piñata if it were patrolled by a security guard with a gun, which wouldn’t go over well at fifth birthday parties. Behind the gun, bright, ruffly pink, orange, blue, and green layers form the building’s façade, and the inside walls are plastered with images of… . things… people, animals, ladies without clothes… all with the head of a piñata donkey mascot pinned onto them, another child’s game, backwards. We drink margaritas — mine a salty huckleberry — and eat meals — birria quesadilla for me. Bryce speaks flawless Spanish with both waitresses, who are wearing black polo shirts sponsored by Tito’s and Tostitos, respectively. The shameful tacos and quesadillas are, shamefully, very good.
After dinner, we move in a pack to the nearby Walgreens, and then back to our street. And if you thought this story’s cats began and ended with our friends Bread and Tomato Salsa in Nora’s house, think again. As we wander home, slinky black and orange and brown and white street cats dart between the parked cars or rest languidly by the curb, silent, watching with mournful eyes. The night ends with the seven of us in the sitting room, and cold foamy beers, until we’re too tired to go on and the 5am wakeup and miles of laughter start to wear into the bones. Alternatively, the night ends with a freestyle rap song, and then only later a 3am pelting rainstorm. I’ll let the rap song speak for itself, put you to sleep before the next newsletter wakes you up:
When we hit the Walgreens,
Yeah we all queens,
Makes me wanna scream
Everybody on a screen
Got that algorithmic media,
It’s imepdin’ ya
When this could be the dream with ya
Chillin’ on the beach with ya
Make a margarita
Then we toast it Puerto Rico
Cause I love all my amigos
And I go wherever you go
With my homies for the week though
And I’ll see you all tomorrow.
Con amor y encanto,
Frog