Before

Cuba is divided into here, there, and back. Before, during, and after. This of course implies that my expectations are high, assuming a period of processing, "after." Is this or will it be the case? Now, I don't know. Now, this is what I know to expect: heat, crumbling buildings, a centrally planned economy, peripheral economies. But expectations are what I'm trying to avoid, I'm trying to be more like grass than a tree. Now, I am thinking about making maps, etching them with my feet into my snarled intestines, but I don't know what really happens in the body. Now, "Cuba" has been uttered and iterated into an abstraction, or "experience." "An amazing experience," "an unforgettable experience." It's early 20s, experience season, and I'm hunting around with my buckshot gun. On the menu of every restaurant I read, "Cuba, available seasonally," "Havana in a duck sauce with a poached egg." Am I a poacher or a licensed hunter? Cities I stole like road trip mementos: a salt shaker, a NASCAR poster from a bathroom wall, el Malecón? I've tried feigning ownership before and that was like making glass out of sand. The map I'm drawing expires on April 2nd and then the third division of Cuba enters the house, though my astrological terms might be off. "Here" is the worst third because I have nothing to do but retrace the maps I made in high school, jumping from smoking section to smoking section soundtracked by apathetic screaming singers. Here's to hoping that this regression is temporary. "Now" is pregnant with twins, and one is necessarily stillborn: Is it me to be enveloped into Cuba, or Cuba inscribed into me? With either child, something is stolen. The liminal "there" is full of footnoted caveats: Living in a city that is not my city, writing myself into a story knowing the page on which I'm bound to be written out. The pages are still blank, which I know is a dead metaphor, but the traveler's palimpsest is always-already cliché. There aren't many things to say about waiting that haven't already been said.