Reaching Rock Bottom, at the Beach of Your Dreams

October 20, 2023

Text and photos by Nester Nuñez (La Joven Cuba)

HAVANA TIMES – You’ve arrived at the beach of your dreams. You know you need to throw yourself in. You know that these waters and this time under will heal you. You look at the clear blue sky. The sun is still soft in the morning. The boat rests on a serene and transparent sea. A bird song in the distance calms you down. You take a deep breath. You let yourself fall into the depths.

Years ago, I had a poet friend who always wore big headphones. He used to go to work or his girlfriend’s house like this. You’d see him walking down any street in the city, on a bus, or sitting on the river esplanade or on a park bench like this. When I’d see the poet with his headphones on, I’d make a sign to greet him, but I wouldn’t bother him. I’d leave him alone with his music, with his audiobooks or whatever it was he was listening to. Until one day, curiosity got the better of me:

“What do you listen to so much?” I asked him. He didn’t hear me at first, of course. “What, what are you listening to?”

My friend took off the headphones and put them on me without smiling, without saying a word, without changing his calm expression. I didn’t hear anything. No music, no audiobook. I told him to play it. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the other end of the cable, all chewed up. I think he explained what had happened to me, but I couldn’t hear him. The headphones fit snugly. They isolated noise in a scary way.

A man who lives in the city from time to time without noise. A man who sees everything in black and white, at times. A man, a woman, who consciously buffers their sense of hearing, pays more attention to smells, to what they can see, to touch. A person like this isn’t afraid to access the ideas and emotions their mind conjures up. It’s a human being that is experiencing a different way to be free. Every now and again, I go back and read his poetry.

The cold water makes the hair on your skin stand on end. Your survival instinct is activated. You feel your lungs full of oxygen. The bottom of the sea draws you in. Your arms and legs move to take you further down. With the first stroke, you leave the sound of car engines behind. With the second, all of the music becomes your heartbeat. You go down. Human voices sound like air bubbles in the sea. Your mind is calm, relaxed. Blackouts don’t exist. Children don’t have to go to school. You don’t have to go out and look for food for tonight. Your mind is calm, relaxed. You’re just a wet body embraced by a pleasant depth. You’ve gone back to your mother’s womb. The placenta protects you.

I once had a diabetic friend who broke limits. He drank rum while the National Ballet of Cuba was dancing Coppelia at the theater. At night, he’d look for his mother and grandmother’s bones at the cemetery so he could bring them back home. He’d put cigarettes out on his arm. He painted paintings of grotesque creatures on top of the dome of a Catholic cathedral, without ever wanting to make it or make money, just to exorcise the demons he had inside him. “Let go of all hope!” he’d say next to his front door.

People either loved him or hated him, there was no middle ground. It’s hard to have a friend who constantly shows you that you can live a completely different life; that your surroundings only suffocate you if you let them; that the Government established limits and laws in its favor, and that it isn’t as hard to break them as it seems. I was a normal guy: I belonged to the group of people who would call him crazy. Three minutes still hadn’t passed since I’d surrendered myself to the depths of the sea, nor had I met the guy wearing headphones.

You see algae float with the rise and fall of the tide. Colored fish play in front of your eyes. The sun’s rays disperse all around you. It’s like being in a dream. Thirty seconds, two minutes, all of the years of your life: the time you’ve spent in this kind of maternal uterus has been pleasant, but it’s now too much. What was a comfort zone is now beginning to oppress you. You don’t have any oxygen and the excess of carbon dioxide in your bloodstream is going to make you explode. Your body and mind can’t resist the pressure. Staying down below is crazy. You take off the lead belt and begin your ascent, desperate to get up to the top.