en cuba se inventa

There was a hotel with an internet kiosko, which in that year meant one machine and a price per minute that made you compose in your head before you sat down. Faded, everyone says, about that hotel and every hotel in Cuba. And my memory too.

The girl behind the counter was flirting with me. Maybe. I had malaria. She walked me out to the lawn, or to the rectangle of dying grass that had served as a lawn? and we stood and looked at the malecon, and everything felt possible.

I think that is what a fever actually is. Not more options. Fewer determinations. The cars going past kept alive on duct tape and 'en cuba se inventa', which is a whole engineering philosophy compressed into three words, and I was thirty-something and running the same way without the name.

Then the fever took me on plane to California to a New Year's with my future ex. Nobody took the lawn away from me. I walked off it, on purpose, toward the known quantity, because the known quantity had a zipcode, a flight number and the other had nothing but the weather. You do not lose infinite possibilities, you decline them, at a counter, politely, and then you keep declining annually and the compounding is brutal.

The divorce was awkward. They say you can never regret bringing a child into this world. And I don't. At all.

Now I am in Colombia. Alone. Posible.