To this day, few things help me slip into sleep. When I was younger, though, my father came to the rescue every night. With the right words strung seamlessly together, his sentences became visions that danced overhead, lulling me into another world.
“On a not-so-faraway island,” he’d begin, “there’s magic in the sand, and the sea, and the music….” He would tell me of towns painted in colors I didn’t know existed, of a cliff that he called “the edge of the world.” He’d walk me through lush green rainforests, and under orange and pink evening skies that illuminated the coastline. His face lit up as he described the rich flavors of mango and coconut ice cream, or a spicy-hot pork mofongo with mouthwatering meat that fell right off the bone. As I grew older, it became obvious: My bedtime stories were my dad’s vivid recollections of Puerto Rico—and his way of returning to the island he’d left before I was born.
My dad was raised across western Puerto Rico: Rincón, Aguadilla, and Mayagüez, a mountainous coastal city. He spent much of his life in the latter, at his father’s beach house. He loved it, with its coat of white paint, wicker furniture, and position on stilts along a rocky cliff. Wooden stairs from the back door extended to kiss the sand, and bright green iguanas would regularly sneak in (eventually terrifying my mother). In the early ’80s, my grandfather left Puerto Rico and opened a sweater factory in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where I currently live. Bringing my father with him, it became their home away from home. They were not alone—that building on Graham Avenue was part of the neighborhood’s growing Puerto Rican community in the ’90s.
For the first decade of my life, I heard so much about the island, and that white house, but had seen neither for myself. So, in June 2010, my father finally booked flights for the two of us to visit. Our plan was to drive through the island from east to west. My father would get visibly giddy explaining this feeling he knew he’d have when the highway turned narrow, and the road veered toward the coast; his stomach would flip. “That view,” he’d tell me, “it’s even more beautiful than a painting.” At only 10 years old, I couldn’t fathom it: What could be more beautiful than a painting?
In anticipation, I doodled palm trees in my journals, daydreamed about the sea, and even styled my beach outfits. Then, just a few weeks after booking the trip, my father experienced sudden cardiac arrest, passing away in my childhood home. In a cloud of grief, my mother and I swiftly moved away. Our plane tickets, four months from then, were forgotten about—two empty seats on the plane where we should have sat.
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My grandfather, who had moved back to Mayagüez in 2018, became my only remaining tie between Puerto Rico and New York. Without my dad, I fell out of communication with the rest of our family on the island, but every so often my grandfather would call and request a visit. When the world emerged from the fog of the pandemic, it struck me that a decade had gone by since my father’s passing and I still hadn’t made it to Puerto Rico.
Rebooking the trip became inevitable, and I finally arrived in San Juan in early July 2021. I swiftly dropped my bags and walked through the streets of Miramar, colored by bright yellow houses with blue awnings and rosy flowers blowing from the trees with every gust from the ocean. I could hear my father in my ears: “You’ll always feel the ocean is close.”
