There are no insurmountable barriers but…

—Thirty-four years to find my right path. Once again I try to be methodical, forcing myself to set goals. Now I write with true, categorized words. I’m not able to finish anything. Everything I’ve written up until today seems less than stupid. What else can I do to win the right to the city, to be and express, to reach Ithaca triumphantly?

However, something is wrong here. The program keeps saying error. There’s no option but to reset. I’m beneath a paperweight, motionless and protected from flight. Ink spreads out and is confused like ancient land masses that emerge and gather for the big explosion. So what’s next? Who will be around to pick up the spoils? What body will take mine? What name will we take and to what land? I rush to pinch myself to shape a memory.

I still want to believe that my body isn’t this island limited by the waters: to believe that 34 years in one land without a passport to anywhere, without the necessary option of contrasting my ideas with other voices that see from other eyes and another reality, doesn’t limit my vision.

Living on an island, without land borders, is to feel already isolated from the world. If added to that fact you include the nearly impossible prospect of saving the money to travel and overcome the immigration barriers, it’s enough to turn anyone into a melancholy and alienated being.

But I want to be something more, for that reason I want to feel that I’m not lying to you, that I’m not exaggerating, and that this is not the frustration of a solitary Cuban. Today, I’m just a human being that wants to sleep in his small room and send out smoke signals from there.

However, I get tangled up and fall into the temptation to let my senses take over. Then the objects become covered with a dribble that contaminates and asphyxiates; an eraser of footprints, a resigned slovenliness. Digitally retrievable on this electronic page and broken up in my discourse, I move my fingers and I’m surprised I can still write. However, the fear has disappeared of losing myself in the words as long as I find a good seed. Is that what a state of communion is?

I believe I’m touching the bottom. I no longer am waiting for my reality to magically change, for a day to come when I could decide from which land to talk to you, in which language, or according to what criteria that would be most respectful to you, and in that place come close to understanding.

There aren’t any insurmountable barriers but likewise there are no bridges, just empty spaces communicable by states of grace. Empty spaces to create or destroy? Empty spaces where I await you to work together.

Thirty-four years to understand that we all live on an island or in a land so big that you couldn’t get to know it all in a lifetime and as always we have to choose what ground to walk on and what fruits to plant.