Borrowed Signal

The truth is
I never stopped writing.

I just stopped bringing the words here.

The blog went quiet.

I didn’t.

I was still putting words somewhere.

Notes app.
Receipts.
Margins.
Napkins.

Any little place
that could hold a sentence long enough
for me to remember I existed.

Maybe that is what writing was for me then.

Evidence.

Something to prove:

this happened.

I happened.

I was here.

I carried my father’s ashes back home.

I thought I was carrying the end of something.

But Cuba does not let anything end quietly.

Cuba opened the family plot in front of me
and gave death a body again.

Marble in the sun.

Names cut into stone.

Men lifting bones into daylight
with their hands.

Hips.

Elbows.

Screws.

The hardware of people
who had lived long enough
to leave proof behind.

And there I was

with my father’s ashes

watching him return
to the people he loved.

Ashes beside remnants.

Dust beside metal.

Love beside what survived the fire.

No one tells you
grief can become physical again.

That one day
you may stand in Havana’s oldest cemetery
and understand the dead
are not gone in one clean gesture.

They remain in pieces.

Names.
Dates.
Boxes.
Bones.

Flowers under brutal sun.

And the daughter standing there

trying to look brave

while history is being opened at her feet.

Later

I escaped to a hotel bar
full of tourists
and borrowed signal.

His favorite beer
sweating in front of me.

Bucanero.

Amber.
Sugar cane.
Cold enough for the heat.
Bitter enough to sit beside grief
without asking it to leave.

I was a few drinks in
when I opened my phone
because there was nowhere else
to put it.

At the time

I thought I was writing
about signal.

I wasn’t.

I was writing
about grief.

About trying
to reconnect
after leaving a cemetery.

About sitting
on an island

where the outside world
arrived
in fragments.

Being surrounded
by tourists

while my father had just
been returned

to the soil that knew him
before I did.

And maybe that was language
coming back quietly.

Not as rescue.

Not as beauty.

As proof.

A small note.

A little place
where I had to leave some words.

Because even when the blog was silent

even when I thought language had left me

some part of me
was still keeping record.

Some part of me knew

I would need evidence later

that I survived the day

I carried my father back home.