Hold On They Say

This will make sense, this digression from talking about the next song I’ll release, titled Hold On They Say.

The lava rock formations along the northern coast of Puerto Rico are known by any who attempt to traverse them. Prickly, at best, lethal in the worst of cases - shredding skin easier than a cheese grater, especially when footing loses its grip in moving water.

I was with a neighboring family that day, on a trip to the beach with a friend and her parents. Arrived, her father and I walked to an outcropping of rock in the surf, he ahead, me, some 15 ft behind, carefully step stepping in my red flip-flops. I guess I was about nine or ten.

As a child of the tropics and the sea, fear and confidence governed my approach to open water. I felt at home, and wanted to be near or in water, but I dreaded its crushing blows and the sucking vortex that follows a failed surf. The ocean requires constant reassessment, even by, or especially by, a small child so easily washed away.

“So easily washed away and taken” - This is something the nurses said to me in the hospital afterwards, in Spanish, of course. I didn’t respond at the time because my body was raw from the scrapping and slicing of volcanic rock, and my mind in shock at the directness of the assault. I said nothing, but looked and the nurse said “me entiendes?”. I sat naked and shivering on the metal gurney as they scrubbed everywhere, sponges soaked in orange iodine. “Si, te entiendo”, I nodded in my head.

The arc of droplets blossoming off a low promontory are timeless and laden with meaning. Great beginnings, orchestral endings, rainbow moments caught just before a heavy sluice descends and the body is thrown onto the rocks, then pulled out to sea by currents long preceding any known thing.

Down I fall, tail over teakettle, pell-mell, one flip flop gone, but recalling the words “hold on”. Obeying them like the good girl I was, finding that holding on meant pain and the rejection of a world that says “go with the flow”. I lay ragdoll watching the swell’s retreat and wondering if, once I could stand up, I would find my other flip flop. I heard the father’s cries. His helpful arms lifted me, carried me to the car and then to “Bella Vista” hospital. My silence, begun on the rocks, continued through the next hours and several days.

The stone in the video is not the rock I fell on, but the pull of the waves is familiarly unrelenting. As was my hold, it turns out, by one hand, on the dream that was a rock spewn up and settled in an earlier time, long before a girl with red flip flops followed a call to the sea and then made a different tale by resisting (with hope if not optimism) the insistence of open water, with it’s welcome forgetfulness, sorrow and rest.

Hold On They Say. Next Thursday, August 21, one more offering in song.

Photography by Lara Callahan