desayuno

There is a wonderful rhythm to the mornings here. It's like a full-soul experience. First, you open your eyes sometime between 5 and 6 and the thing you notice is that you are sticky. Your legs are sprawled outside your sheet and there are beads of sweat on your forehead. Then you look ahead at the big arching windows across your bunk bed and see a sunrise-sky. It's gorgeous and blushing, as if someone wouldn't stop telling it how beautiful it was. And then you realize it's early, and you fling your sheet to the edge of the bed, do this little dance trying to find a position that most directly receives circulating air from the fan. You close your eyes for another hour.

You wake up again. People are stirring or have already leaped for freedom into the living room or out to the roof where it is cooler than your sauna of a room. You move with a slow rhythm, weighed down by heat. It isn't really a bad sensation, it's more like a feeling of your skin fitting your bones better, or like you've been sweating out a fever and are now getting well, or like you're discovering what it'd be like if you were to hold the hand of the earth, what the heat of her palm would be against your fingers. You feel feel heavy with something good and sincere.

Out in the kitchen, Elena is cooking desayuno. You say the word one, two, three times in your head and fall in love with it. You want to dance the salsa with this word. You want to watch it roll around in the air as it leaps from your tongue. It is so beautiful to you....the shape of it, the way it has a beat, the way it is slow and heavy against the bottom of your mouth like a mirror reflection of yourself waking and greeting the sunrise-sky.

You get a cup of coffee, so delicious you drink it black. You say buenos dias to Elena, grab a plate, go sit in the living room where it's cooler and quiet with everyone still processing the heaviness, the day ahead, soaking up the fan-air. Love it here. You're heavy with it.