Que Significa

I thought it'd be cooler, here, in late June, but all night I'm kicking off the sheets and pulling them back over my body in the stillness of my room, until I remember, suddenly, those summers as a boy, lying in the twin bed with you. That was before the highway, when one needed to drive up and down the mountains to get from one side of the island to the other, and Salinas, where fishing nets hung to dry in branches along the shore and we swam in a clearing among the mangroves or rocked in a hammock behind the house where my mother and your father were born, still seemed untouched by "America." Sometimes, at the bakery, or with the woman who sold lottery tickets outside the restaurant, or as the men drove us in the back of their trucks past the sugarcane fields, not understanding a word or turn of phrase, a joke someone made, I'd ask, Que significa, but it was already over or too hard to explain, you'd say. I grew homesick for English. One summer, at the movies, you cried so hard, it scared me, the screen lighting your wet face. One summer, sprawled out on the floor in front of the tv in our bathing suits, we began to wrestle, laughing until our hands, then our mouths moved across our bodies, driven by a force we let guide us. Then someone stopped, and we lay in the sunlit room breathing hard. Someone must have gotten up and walked away. Someone must have made small talk until we could pretend it never happened. Quiero verte, you said on the phone years later, both of us now with children of our own. And when I made it back one day to the island, I drove to your house, knocking on the large door at the agreed-upon time, but no one answered. The flamboyant trees were in bloom, their bright red blossoms scattered on the street, and it didn't take long to get back to my hotel, but I got lost. I'd never been to that part of the city and so much had changed.