salinas te corazon (amo)
Police German shepherds first, camo, balaclavas, the whole state apparatus arranged in a darq and straggling march like a Leni photo op gone farce. The audience blamed en absentia: cartels, mensajes en the language of fuerza, dogs straining, identities covered. It's a performance and everyone knows the script, none of the extras are looking at the wooden heart mere twenty meters away.
There, in a frame festooned with lights, backed by palms, built for exactly any moment, some father holds his daughter. The most well behaved childhood ADHD I have witnessed, frozen in foto, chin up, the cameras glow her stage for a half-second.
Then she is gone ... running into traffic, and for an intake of breath the real danger on the malecon is not theater. No dogs. Not cartels. A kid versus a curb.
and she pirouettes. Mimics a perfectly pretend foto of her impossibly young parents. The camera reverses, the subject becomes the parents? framed how a four-year-old mind snaps them into the past. And still every staged threat looms, uniformed and armed. But the real terror is a cygnet's ballet, over and salvation before I could even flinch.
Salinas, is there such a thing as too many parades? Clearly you think no. Cheers for a borrowed Cup, I mean, it's Spain's now, no reward for an improbable run that packed our bleachers for underdogs on the cusp of elimination. Salinas of the faithful blind, mestizo youth bearing marks of conquistadores, tall, proud, bedecked in yellow, the occasional Argentina jersey cutting across the colonial, cuz Messi eterni. Loyalty to a single star, no flag.
We even have a surf shop, off the drag, no whales-and-buggies signage, no come-hither energy; people who need it know where to find it. Confidence of a town that does not need to try hard, an ease in dropping in where the swells break, always an afterthought.
Maybe that is my attraction. This place bruised by salt
Dark towers by night tell you who owns us, unlit, yet still on a ledger, each slice of the crescent sand, new hyphenates tacked onto old surnames, and on the sea? After-party yachts, improbably white in blackened waves, mast lights pulsing. Who owns what on shore, who owns what on our bay?
Salinas te corazon (amo).