Havana Heartbreak

1,596 words, 8 minutes read time.

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

He was Cubano, and I’m not Cubano. Life is a misery though, for many men alike. He had dark and hardened skin, with a texture of leather parchment.

I am a fish, an alien fish. I am used to being all alone in the Carribean ocean.

Alien fish are from earth too, did you know that? Did you know alien fish blow bubbles too? Round bubbles, of course, and sometimes triangular bubbles too.

It would be a strange sight, I imagine with my alien fish brain, when people along the Malecón would gather and marvel at the sight of triangular bubbles rising from under the water, and up into the sky.

I am an alien fish, pressed up against the stones of the Malecón from below. I am stranded and weak. My alien heart has been broken.

He was a Cubano, with skin so dark that it gleamed. He cast no line.

Is this not the northern hemisphere, western hemisphere? If there is a fisherman so seasoned, he would tell me, before impaling my frail body with a hook. Then I will be dead. Then his misery would end.

Before today, I had a dream. A dream so vivid I mistook it for reality. I mistook her silence for contemplation, a moment that we shared in harmony.

We exchanged looks, locked eyes, I thought there ought to be an exchange of emotions. It was restlessness from my side. Doe-eyed, she smiled.

Polyphiloprogenitive was the idea of love, instantenously slapped down. Before it could grow legs and run. A fish ought not to have legs, even an alien one, but I was a man.

It was my right hemisphere acting up. It ought to stop. I ought to snap out of this dream. I ought to be an alien fish, spending its life alone in the Carribean ocean.

Hope is but a fleeting apparition. I feel alone.

I am alone. I am an alien fish in the Carribean ocean.

It was my right hemisphere, I was susceptible to dreams. So I swim up the left side of the shore. May the dry wind that is blowing past my right gill sweep my life away.

Then I remember the same dream. I remember how it unfolded.

I try really hard to piece together emotions, fragments of memories, like photos from afar, but it is all blurry.

It was a certain kind of silence, negligence, that tore through the space and time, banishing the apparition. I was the culprit.

An immense sense of self-reproach struck. Before the definite and impending doom. I was a statue. I must have appeared a statue. A statue of a man? I don’t know. One cannot see his own face.

So I stayed a statue. The volcanoes erupted, then followed by 20 years of earthquakes and 30 years of ice age. People lived and died. A Moai that stood through time. I gathered a handful of asynchronous claps and cheers, that was my reward.

I can see an old man, in my dying vision. Can it be so coincidental that he is Santiago, who goes way out? Am I still in one piece?

I am yowling in pain, in a sort of fish voice. A fish voice is a kind of voice nobody can hear, not even myself.

A fish dies quickly out of water. What about an alien fish? It is to my horror that alien fish don’t die, but suffer the pain of suffocation and dehydration for all eternities, on this side of the shore.

Dreams have been my source of vicarious pleasures. Such as the pleasure of love, the pleasure of being loved.

The vision of the man evokes an old ache in me. I have wondered for years what differences set apart an alien fish from a man. I wanted them in full rigor, letterpressed onto ledgers.

However, there are too many uncertainties.

For example, am I being remote-controlled? Since I feel like looking at the world from afar, like through a snow globe. Who is my master?

Details in the world are scarier the closer I look at them, the deeper I dig. Unlike fractals, reality’s order simply falls apart upon any inspection.

Then I try really hard to remember the same dream again, maybe too hard. The more I try to remember the same dream the more the signals of pain and of struggle sharpen. This is no good.

Surely, I was in love with my own imagination, and the signals of affection were my projection onto her. Who is the real her? I don’t know.

Her composure and kindness seemed real and generic. To her, I was no different from the office door, which she was just as polite to. Many such cases in women, in my memory.

Limerence of a fish.

Despair sends shiver down my body, and I flip to the other side.

As if something in me snaps, I begin to flounder frantically.

I can make it back into the water, if I try a little bit harder. Yet my fish brain is preoccupied with the primitive instinct to escape from it all.

To escape from it all is to escape from the world, yet the world is giant fishtank. For a fish, to escape from a giant fishtank is no different from growing a pair of legs and becoming a man.

The thought of that gives me despair, and I cease my struggle.

I am an alien fish, laying on one side, drowning in air.

The old man comes before me, a black mountain. The sun hides behind him. He utters a few words into my face, but I do not know human language. I speak to him in fish voice, he gladly nods.

Then he disappears, just like that. The sun scorches me, I silently weep.

No one would come to the rescue of an alien fish.

No one has ever seen an alien fish.

There had been a total of 6 alien fish, in our galaxy, each thousands of light years away.

A seagull brings me that knowledge, gliding down, about to consume me.

Then I know, there is no escape. There is no escape from death, and there is no escape from all the misery before that. If this bird is to consume me piece by piece, in an extremely excruciating way, then it has to happen. I am to become food for my predator, the product of my fate.

What a big mean bird! You and your cousins, now all congregating at my soon-to-be carcass, puffing out your chests, heads cocked skyward, wings tucked tight and squawking into the sky. Foul beasts! I wish I could grow a pair of arms to grab you by the neck and snap!

My despair transforms into fury. Fury fuels me. Suddenly both of my eyes can see.

I can see my ordinary hands, and my ordinary… naked human body.

I can see around me, this is not the Malecón.

I can see people’s faces, and their bodies, naked; I divert my eyesight.

I want to say something, for there is such an imperative.

I feel like something has changed, the triangular cogs of the machine meshing against one other are now gone. No gear is turning anymore, they are all just circles. The world is bunch of circles. Circles’ thoughts are circles. I turn and look at her, there is no expression on her face, then a hint of avoidance. I know I have no ground, so I took her oil-paper umbrella and left.

Camera: Nikon Z7
Lens: Nikkor Z 24-120mm f/4 S

Wherever you end up, be it some other town in Cuba, or Panama, or Florida.

I will look for you.

I will find you.

AND I WILL MAKE YOU PAY.