While I was here, just outside of the city of Oranjestad, I jotted down some thoughts I had at the bars, beaches, and nightclubs that I visited. None of them are especially impressive, but I have recently decided that I will no longer be ashamed of my “unpolished” ideas and creations. Visiting San Diego for the International Comic Convention, coupled with the excessive amounts of Tolkien, Shakespeare, and Milton I have been reading lately, has inspired me to start writing freely again. So here goes.

August 6
I’m out and the lights are like stars. I dream that death is my salvation. I know that in truth it is oblivion. “What a piece of work is man!” “A God! A God their severance ruled!” And so I live on, speaking words that have no meaning, breaking promises I never really intended to keep.

August 8
I found the corpses of two decaying serpents, lying in the dust beside a great structure of stone on this ancient island.
• The fantasy and phobia of decay: it is innate to us
• Two beings entwined in themselves
• A half-foot of distance between them (us?)
• A slow stench hanging in the warm air

I found a beach full of stones stacked together by tourists, all who had hoped that their wish would come true, or perhaps simply wanted to join this manufactured “tradition.” I reject them, and yet I do not disturb them, and instead carve a winding path through wishes unfulfilled: making my way slowly towards the sea.
• I understand now why Tolkien writes about the sea
• Spray kisses my face
• Those colors: a thousand shades of blue and green crowned with white foam
• All water returns there, unchanging
• What a wonderful way to die

Perhaps I discern, beneath layers of tourism and manufactured existence, the ancient vitality of this colonized island: the lost but still-living history that breathes richly, dimly, and slowly throughout its foundations of volcanic rock.

We found this man, Robb he calls himself, and with the appearance of this young father of two other children, all of the briefly forgotten tragedies of a broken home recommence. I’m attracted to him; Cole won’t leave his side. My own father’s absence is stitched through our realities in a way that leaves us dissembled, fluttering in the wind like the skin of that decaying serpent: exposing bare, intricate, beautiful bones.