I wondered if I was in love with Mistou. I’d only seen her four times in my life.
My New Year’s visit confirmed in my mind that we were compatible, but she was in Miami. I was in Panama, for the time being at least. This was all logistics shit, yeah- but was I in love with her?
Could she ever love me?
Did it matter?
After a week of family time in BK and a week in Miami trying to figure out if the full range of human emotion would ever course through my veins, I was back “home” in Panama City. I’d moved into an apartment in Bella Vista as soon as the furniture that I’d had shipped from New York had arrived, so my return from the holidays was to a spot that did sort of feel like my own.
I have to admit, my time in the States had left me a little disoriented. But I pushed through the internal fog- got back to work, started stepping up my working sessions with Wilkie in anticipation of Hopeton’s visit and socialized with Mundo and Gianina on weekends.
And then, late at night on January Twelfth, my phone started blowing up.
My parents, Mistou, Hopeton, people from Brooklyn, random friends from university who I mainly kept up with on Facebook.
Haiti had been hit with a 7.0 earthquake. Port au Prince was devastated and Jacmel was rocked. Fuck.
All these decades later, I still can’t talk about the people we lost, houses destroyed, memories erased. And in those first moments, I knew there was nothing I could do. It wouldn’t be helping anyone if I figured out a way to get down there as soon as possible. My mind raced through a complicated trajectory of all of my passports, the possibility of entering via the DR, where I’d stay once I’d managed to trek to Port au Prince… But I knew I’d need to wait until my skills would be useful, whenever Haiti was ready to begin rebuilding. Maybe that was the higher purpose behind my being sent to Panama to learn how to deal with construction shit.
The immediate aftermath was hard to digest. I was a total wreck. Mundo and Wilkie took it easy on me. Gianina wrote out a huge check against her Miami bank account and asked me to give it to my mom, so she could give it to her church.
