Saudade’s a word I knew before I understood, and I understood years before I’d begin to learn its language. It’s Portuguese for longing, yearning, desire, nostalgia. If it had a flavor it’d be tamarind. If it had a color it’d be a stinging pale orange like a faded version of the red sand in my mind’s southwestern landscapes. If it sung, it’d sound like Diego El Cigala or the gray ashes of a cigarette. 

I was sixteen years old, sad, full of pulp. My lips were chapped. I fell in love. It wasn’t a place, song, an evening, week, or person —-it was the conjunction constructed of them all. It was waking up in upstate New York, eight in the morning, listening to Jovanotti on the ledge of the second floor terrace-style balcony, alone, staring uphill at the cars, runners, trees. It was staring at hills, being on uneven ground for the first time in my Caribbean life. It happened in the same way that the wind picked my hair up off my shoulders and neck and into the air.

It was walking fast, keeping a porous mind, sensitivity to sensing, feeling the skins of things between my fingers, eating lychee, getting splinters from rolling over bales of hay. It was apparent in the comfortable, tense silences, in the tufts of grass in my fists pulled from the ground I lay on while reading. I knew the way you know about a ripe fruit before you hold it, the way my left knee aches before rain.

In my memories I read the wrinkles on a watch, add up the nothing-touches between knees and thighs on buses and stuffed old leather couches. I come up with numbers (10, 13, 23, 30) and snapshots of a purple bikini; frisbee in the rain; salsa-dancing to zydeco; a dead fish; Celtic manuscripts; two lonely fireflies; making shapes out of chains on a porch swing early in the night. 

It was a fireworks show, heads tilted, thinking of Vonnegut and being aware of how nice it was as it was. 

It was fireworks: bright but full of smoke, quick and loud, burning, and an unmistakable smell in the air —-a symbol of summer and independence.