limping epilogue- no big conclusions or answers

Two weeks ao i arrived to porto rico, back to the reality of those simple but powerful words of 'home' 'family' and 'friends'. Its not that i'm havin trouble with any of them, overall they are as good as ever, or even better, maybe because now i'm better. But they are questionable because i did make happen 'home' 'family' and 'friends' on the ship and its weird how this core words and worlds are not exclusive, the way in which la habana or burma can be home, and porto rico will still hold through to the word at the same time.
i miss my friends, but overall i miss the environment, for i know that if i make some effort i can retain some of them but not the atmosphere and there was somethin special about living in that kind of environment: the exiting prospect of discovery in everystep with the relief that we are all together in this (even that annoying whiney girl to whom i would have never spoken in any other situation is also in a similar place to me and i can't hate her.
Now i'm back home and the old rules are on again, because i went around the world but the world also passed by me, it never stopped to be passively looked at, it stared right back, but for good or worse i was the one that changed the most... or so i feel. i can't concretise how, or much less why, maybe its all perfomative and i just say that (and thus am) changed, but its real enough and the fact that i cant explain it makes it weirder.
also i just do not want to go back to normal, to 'home' to those life and personality institutions ( family, friends, overall social networks) that held me together, even if i owe them some (more like a lot) of my succes. Because i feel that i sould somehow outgrown some of the old things i did. I mean, i did outgrown them on the ship, but now is like i have to do it all over again, because it really doesn't count if they didn't see it, if porto rico didn't get that its not so weird to buy a foreigner a drink just because he is visiting and why not. So many locals gave me so much that i feel endowed to give something back, but im not sure how.
i'm being vague, i know. its irritating. i also know that, believe me. i'm working on it. but just to at least have somthing concrete on what i want to do as a result of the trip here go a couple f goals/plans whatever for the next couple of months.
1-i want to publish a book, i want to work on my writting and i want to be serious about it. I will. That's the macro goal, it will realize/be worked through publishing a collection based on what i wrote on the blog. Then i'll consider book fairs and other ways of self advertisement, because i dont want it to be just lying somewhere in my house. I want to fit for it, if by the end i still have tons home, well, i never intended to live of it, but i want to give it a chance and expose my work and with it myself.
-----as part of this i must state - the cambodia piece will go out complete - read also it got severel mutilated by selfcensure and its missing about a page and a half on the grimmer aspects of my fathers story and cancer, of course.
2-i wont go to plaza las americas for the next four months - i dont expect anybody to get it but its not some "i'm a rebel, ARG!!" its more of a personal thing, like a religious promess, you give something in exchange of a favour or as thanks, in my case is a thanks and i send my respects thing. also a living memento of my trip and my nearly four mall-less months. yes, it is possible.
3-i will strive to choreograph 1 dance piece or a considerable part of it (not a whole show) and present it.
4- take whatever show we end up doing in modern dance to adance festival
5 - get a paid intership this summer - it must be really challenging
6 - stay in touch with SASERS
7 - read more in spanish
8 - publish some articles wherever for whatever - very posh and dignified right?
9 - basicly: create, not produce, and show, dont tell (unless it is for others to decide if to see what you show)

Just a little ray of light - 1st draft, its quite rough around the edges

I had never thought much of rays. I knew they were cartilaginous fish, and surprisingly, closely related to the much feared sharks; but apart from that, since they never stirred much controversy, never got the star attention of their fearsome cousins. However, to this day I still remember a close encounter with one in the battlefield that had been the waters around Cayo la Yayí, one of many keys near Vieques, Porto Rico. Back then, those waters were used as bombing range by the US Navy while the fisherman of Porto Rico struggled to regain what before the 1948 forced removal was their land and waters. I wondered how such a delicate and graceful animal, spineless to the point of being literally boneless, could dare to nonchalantly swim by the bombs.
I was 15 and enjoying myself in the key’s clear waters who could have easily decorated any Caribbean paradise-like postcard image: warm, clean and serene in its play of cobalt and emerald colors. It’s amazing how the sea refuses to be blue in these places. And then, I had the childish impulse of looking under the water even though I could have seen anything from above. There it was, with a chain attached to it and spikes coming out like a godforsaken sea urchin, the 1 feet in diameter bomb silently stood its ground against the almost imperceptible movement of the waves. Just when I was about to run out of the beach in fear, a ray appeared. It didn’t seem afraid to flaunt its greatness and shadow the bomb from the sun or me with its size that doubled the bomb’s.
But then it got too close and actually touched the bomb. For a second I trembled thinking that we were all lost. Me, the ray, the placid sway of the waves; we would just be a couple more martyrs for what was already a national struggle against the US Navy’s use of Vieques, its beaches and keys, as military playground. Like David Sanes, who was accidentally killed by a US Marine jet pilot a year before, in 1999, we would end up in all the newspaper covers. “LA MARINA MATA OTRA VEZ” they would scream in red capital letters and the people would be outraged at the Navy killing Porto Ricans again. I was young and in the middle of a nationalistic spree against what was considered one more aggression in a list of imperialist like abuses, but I still wasn’t suicidal, so I left the waters and just told my parents that I saw a big ray. It was also sandy grey on top and slimy white underneath, but in my Caribbean limited world that was how all rays were, so I didn’t notice until today that I meet again with reckless rays.
It turns out that on the other side of the world, yet along the same incendiary latitude that is the Tropic of Cancer, lays another hot blooded sea, so obstinate its scarlet infatuation that it goes by the name of the Red Sea. Being enclosed, among others, by Egypt and Saudi Arabia it sways knowingly of its credentials in history, Moses and Mohamed being only two of the references it could put in its maritime resumé. On one side the proximity of Mecca brings it closer to heaven and on the other Luxor’s temples and burial grounds ground it to the ruddy earth.
When I first found out that I was going to Egypt I knew I had to go and see this inland water way. I had never dived in my life, nor really had any passion for it, but I knew it was a divers Mecca and I suddenly had to grab my Gatorade and “just do it”. I rummaged through guides until I finally found the perfect town: Dahab. It had facilities, yet it wasn’t a quirky tourist Disneyland like Sharm el-Sheik or nearby Hurgada. On the contrary, Dahab was right near a natural oasis were Bedouins had lived for centuries, and it was them who ran the town, not some rich Saudi Arabians with big hotels reeking of oil.
I wanted to escape the oily past, and sadly, present, of the Arab world, it reminded me of the third world irony that seemed to run rampant among these latitudes, past the cancerous line. Countries incredibly rich in resources, still struggled to reach their northern neighbors success. Europe with its wine obsessions and fascist tendencies could still be more resourceful than the lands of the infamous black gold resource.
I planned to forego the option of crossing the Suez Canal in order to experience a less industrial, but more monumental heritage present in the Sinai region. Here Dahab’s deserts looked down sternly on the Red Sea’s eccentric collection of life: red corals, turtles, lion fishes and, of course, rays strolled by without the menace of inflation or oil drilling machines. Here rays could just be rays, or even stingrays, which is how the bigger ones with tails are called; it’s hard to know who’s who in a family of over four hundred. And here lives the Dark-spotted ray. It’s not really interesting; it’s a ray, it has spots, they happen to be dark. After coming up with Garibaldis, killer whales and clown fishes creativity can be a little stunned, leaving us with nothing else than a straightforward levelheaded Dark-spotted ray.
It turns out that after all my gray big Caribbean ray with its 2 feet across the wings range was merely child’s play, this Arabic fella’ can be up to 5 feet across the wings. But like my adventure loving friend, it’s a little oblivious to politics and national states. It is doing something dangerous, maybe even insidious: it is heading a colonization project right through the Suez. Operation Populate Europe Peripheries it may well be called. OPEP is taking over the Eastern Mediterranean and then who knows where. It makes you wonder why would they start crossing the Suez now and not take advantage of it from the beginning in 1869? Are Dark-spotted rays so slow to discover new paths, or just plain afraid of change and modernization that the Suez industrial looks kept them at bay? Or maybe they just heard the call of the wild in a whole new dimension? Maybe the south is getting hotter and hotter, burning with circumstantial problems and like its continental counterparts, now life at sea is just harder to bear? So go north, cross the bridge, the sea, the canal, whichever, and get to Europe.
They say that rays are peaceful; people usually imaging them flying through the big blue sea, the maritime birds of that concave sky. But maybe we just got it wrong and the sky is the sea wannabe in this copying game. The ancient Egyptians used to see the sky as a sea, thus a pharaohs mortal voyage to the afterworld above would begin riding a felucca down the Nile. Eventually, someday, it would finish by docking its vessel in the light blue waters of the upper floating sea. So maybe the storks are really elegantly floating in that converse sea that we call sky and rays really fly.
I never got to Dahab. As life has it I burst my eardrum while doing the second required dive of the PADI examination and couldn’t get my divers license on time. But the rays are still there, fearless like Vieques bomb squad rays, strutting along the Mediterranean, at least all the way up to Turkey, possibly the first Muslim country to enter Europe. Maybe that’s worrisome to storks; any moment now rays may start flying and taking their chimneys. Until then, it may tell us something about the world when even rays are crossing the Suez.