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Description
You said it would take five years and I didn't believe you back then.  I said we'd need more time, more money, government grants from governments that didn't care.  Sitting there in Santa Marta, waiting for the storms to come in, you would just smile at me and then run off down the beach, and I would follow you when the patch of sand I was on got too hot.

My father's company moved him from Andorra, my homeland, and mother and I decided to hold on tightly, wondering where the whirlwind would drop us, the green, cold air pulling our clothes and hair across the ocean.  I couldn't hear until we were off the plane and I was thirteen, getting older in a new country; "Welcome to Colombia."

I didn't know back then that you were the rich boy and I was the poor little company girl.  I just knew your father and mine worked together, leaving us the beach where they wanted to develop the new tidal power station to call our own if we wanted.  The sand was full of gravel, sprouting sharply from the white, shifting surface like an old man's chin stubble.  I hated the way it felt under my sandals.  You never needed those.

The days slid into each other at first, as we didn't say anything, attending the same advanced school.  I spoke Spanish and when you tried to speak to me, I switched to Catalan.  When you wised up to that, I switched to French to be alone with my thoughts and have a familiar voice all at once.  Everyone, even then, would want a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girlfriend, and I was telling you that I was only fourteen, but in French, not happy with giving you my full attention.

I went to the beach every day with my umbrella, listening to the rough, agitated scrape of the waves against the brave, ugly outcroppings that began at the water's edge.  Most days the sun was too bright for me to see much, the bright, angry rays striking the dark blue landscape of the waves, hitting the glittering pebbles on the beach, and going right for my eyes.  I made sure I wore sunglasses after the first time, pink-rimmed ones with oversized lenses.  I heard you laughing the next time, but never turned around, the empty beach thinning out your echoes and saving me a little irritation.  It didn't have to be you, in my mind.  Could have been any Colombian kid from school, all swagger, like the Spanish boys I'd known, but with a different energy- raucous, almost lecherous.

I was too young to appreciate it, and I had come to listen to the hungry racket of the sea birds and the chopping crashes of the waves on the rugged shore.  I'd never heard those things before, and while they scared me as much as everything else in Colombia, they seemed to be calling me, challenging me.  What for I didn't know.

A hurricane had just broken over Cuba, the hungry August sort that dodged away from Africa and laid waste to whatever got in its way, slipping down to us in the hot grey fragments that tore up our blue tropical sky.  Claw marks, you later called those storms- long, loud things with all the intensity of their parent but none of its consistency.  The sun didn't try to the resist this intermission to its reign over the forests on the edge of the city.  It would rain soon, and heavily, I'd heard a teacher say, and I turned to leave the shore and saw you standing behind me, all gangly boy limbs in khaki and cotton. I thought of you as brown all over, with your skin under your clothes, and your short Colombian hair slick but still unruly with youth.  You grinned at me in my blue ruffled sundress, and addressed me in Spanish.

"Perdoname, señorita."

I tried to push past you and that forced out your Catalan.

"Perdó, senyoreta."

I muttered to myself in French, the only language I didn't hear daily, the language of my grandmother.  You answered me in it, insistent and apparently desperate.

"Pardonnez-moi, mademoiselle."

You grabbed my arm lightly and I shrieked, swinging at you with my umbrella.  You apparently didn't realize how you'd upset me, and tumbled back onto your ass, blinking up at me before running off down the beach, away from my neighborhood, to a different part of the company land.  I stared after you, the fluid insistence of your voice turning into a crackle and hum in my head.  Turning for home, I felt strange, and chose not to think anymore on it.  I glanced back out onto the ocean, towards where the company was building a sea wall.  Tidal power was the wave of the future, they said, and I always cringed at the pun.  You laughed at it later, of course, like it was all very cute.

The next few days, the wind and rain grew angry at our coastline and pounded it relentlessly.  I stayed inside, huddling in my warm room, terrified of the weather, still unused to it after a year of subtle Colombian seasons that made no sense to me.  I missed the winter, and had completely been passed over by the novelty of Christmas on the beach.  Father worried all day and night about the project, a whole week elapsing until he could safely ascertain the state of his investment.

That had been the plan, though- take these hurricane leftovers as they came every year and turn them into electricity, both to benefit the mainland and to secure more research deals with North America.  You explained to me later how much the Americans, Canadians, and even my own Europeans were interested in turning the tide and wind into power.  Our fathers talked about the same things in the same ways, ready for each additional phase as soon as more money came in.  It always took far too long for them, as we grew to understand it.  I remained skeptical and disappointed, while you had that glimmer in your eye to say that I shouldn't doubt.
When the next week had passed, the storms died away, and I returned to the beach, curious about what it would look like on one hand, and curious about what you would say on the other.  Deep down I felt nervous, as much about having upset you as having to meet you out there again.  I took my umbrella as usual, feeling more secure with it now than I had before.

The beach was a mess, covered in driftwood and what looked to be pieces of mortar and concrete from the sea wall, or maybe from homes somewhere else.  The skies were still overcast and hovering between grey and blue.  The sun turned everything strange colors, like it was confused and not sure where to pick up what it had been doing before the tempest came.  I felt uneasy, making my way down the water.  The whole beach was quieter, the sea birds sparse and the waves mysteriously calm.  I kicked at a piece of refuse with my foot, the aftermath unsettling me like it hadn't the previous year.  No hurricanes had broken over Cuba before, it seemed.  After a whole year of adjustment, everything was alien again.
I'd never seen you wear sneakers to the beach before, either, but they were the first part of you I noticed, walking parallel with me on the beach.  I looked up and you jumped, making to leave.  I shook my head, hesitated, and raised a hand in greeting.  You blinked at me the way you had the last time I'd seen you, and I knew then, despite my misgivings, despite the fact that I was a fish out of water (and surrounded by it,) that I should trust you enough to show me the rest of the year.

I did that, for better or worse.  Your father, as I imagined somehow, worked for the same company as my father, hoping for a chance shower of favor from the Americans specifically.  You brought a small boat one day and paddled me out to the sea wall, telling me in whatever language I could stand that day (always French, but you gave me the option) what this thing meant for Colombia and the world- new energy, new ways to take energy out of the dangerous storms of the north, new jobs for the townsfolk in this country's growing industrial sector, new places for European gypsy queens like me to end up.  "Gypsy Queen" you called me, referencing some band from Europe you'd heard about (that I'd listened to all my life, the Gipsy Kings, singing in all the languages we knew and some we didn't.)

I asked you the first time if you meant I was a "gypsy princess," but you persisted in saying "gypsy queen."  I knew what you meant, or thought you meant- I would be moving on sometime for my father's next opportunity.  I doubted it, and in time, so did you, but the name endured.  I never grew to enjoy it, but it was endearing.  To make fun of it, I went to a little store downtown and bought you a postcard from here in Santa Marta, giving it to you and telling you I'd send it to myself if I ever left, but you'd have to facilitate that.  You took it with you, naturally, with a smile.  It showed the hills rolling down to our beach, taken by some forgotten photographer, the trees too green for my taste, the houses scattered about the heights like a child's blocks, dropped from some great toy tower.  I never saw it after you took it home (another place I never saw) after we got back from the ocean barrier that day, the sea spray threatening to soak it, the howling and churning of the waves making me fear for my instructions to you.  I had hope with your laugh at what I said, though.  I'd had to yell, anyway.

They built the first wind turbine on the hills above the beach the next year, but you were long gone.  Another followed the next year, strong enough somehow with its white concrete arms to resist the gales coming in each storm, the inexorable menace here on the coast of the South American continent, taking the leftover power from the great Atlantic.  Seven turbines sit here now, looming high over the village.  Our section of Santa Marta keeps growing, building itself, turning alien to me over and over again.  Postcards started coming in from you, always addressed to the company but with my name on them.  I see you smiling at me from New York, Paris, London, Rio de Janero, even as close once as the capital, Bogota, then from San Francisco and further.  Some of them smell like alcohol and others like perfume, sharp and unabashed.  Always you wear nicer and nicer clothes, your father's ambition poking fun at my father's determination.  You knew you were wrong, too, about your gypsy princess, and you kept sending those things until the time was right to stop, when I won't get them anymore.

I am twenty now, and I have told many things to my boyfriend that you never knew about me.  Like those things, he is something you never knew.  I met him the year you left, the year your father gave up and sought safer waters.  My boyfriend came from Andorra, his family like mine vagrant capitalists panning for gold.  Mother joked that we had him brought over because he was good-looking.  I never thought he was, but I took to him after you left because you'd scared me the whole time.  His jaw was too big, his arms too long, his hair too sandy- it looked like the native dark had gotten dirt on it, and that repulsed me.  But he and I spoke as one, thought as one, were afraid of the same things, like you managed to never be.  He is one year younger than you, two years younger than me.

I am going to break up with him today, on the beach so no one will interrupt us.  He will be angry and he will mention you, and I will tell him that I get your postcards, but that I do not love you, and that I am doing what I have to in order to move forward with everyone's lives.  At least that's what I will tell him.

I'm not sure you'd recognize me.  My fair skin took to the sun finally, bronzing itself after countless painful burns you'd have made fun of me for if I'd have put my umbrella down for very long.  I've stripped my body down to muscle and bones, finally buying a proper Colombian bathing suit, swimming the route out to the sea wall instead of taking a boat.  Mother says I am too thin, but I know that I am strong and I could chase you now, if I wanted to.  The salts of Mexico have turned my hair into curls, every bit as long as it always was but infinitely more interesting and intricate, I hope.  I miss it being softer, and so did my boyfriend.  I got sick of him talking about it, though.  That's what made up my mind to go through with the breakup, not you or the postcards.

I'm standing out on the sea wall right now, going to throw a postcard in a bottle into the sea.  The skies are darkening, the Indies shield letting us enjoy another rainy week.  The storm is coming in this afternoon, but the wall will hold completely, like it did last year, and for the first time it will draw power from the tide, like you thought it would five years ago.  I'm not sure how I feel about it, but it is for the best, I understand.  I cannot hope for you to send postcards forever, so I must take what energy I can from this place and withstand the claw marks on my skin.

The rain starts, and I am ready to move on for my own gypsy queen opportunities, jumping into the ocean while I still have time.  I feel my favorite postcard is coming soon.  From Santa Marta, from myself.

Description
You said it would take five years and I didn't believe you back then.  I said we'd need more time, more money, government grants from governments that didn't care.  Sitting there in Santa Marta, waiting for the storms to come in, you would just smile at me and then run off down the beach, and I would follow you when the patch of sand I was on got too hot.

My father's company moved him from Andorra, my homeland, and mother and I decided to hold on tightly, wondering where the whirlwind would drop us, the green, cold air pulling our clothes and hair across the ocean.  I couldn't hear until we were off the plane and I was thirteen, getting older in a new country; "Welcome to Colombia."

I didn't know back then that you were the rich boy and I was the poor little company girl.  I just knew your father and mine worked together, leaving us the beach where they wanted to develop the new tidal power station to call our own if we wanted.  The sand was full of gravel, sprouting sharply from the white, shifting surface like an old man's chin stubble.  I hated the way it felt under my sandals.  You never needed those.

The days slid into each other at first, as we didn't say anything, attending the same advanced school.  I spoke Spanish and when you tried to speak to me, I switched to Catalan.  When you wised up to that, I switched to French to be alone with my thoughts and have a familiar voice all at once.  Everyone, even then, would want a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girlfriend, and I was telling you that I was only fourteen, but in French, not happy with giving you my full attention.

I went to the beach every day with my umbrella, listening to the rough, agitated scrape of the waves against the brave, ugly outcroppings that began at the water's edge.  Most days the sun was too bright for me to see much, the bright, angry rays striking the dark blue landscape of the waves, hitting the glittering pebbles on the beach, and going right for my eyes.  I made sure I wore sunglasses after the first time, pink-rimmed ones with oversized lenses.  I heard you laughing the next time, but never turned around, the empty beach thinning out your echoes and saving me a little irritation.  It didn't have to be you, in my mind.  Could have been any Colombian kid from school, all swagger, like the Spanish boys I'd known, but with a different energy- raucous, almost lecherous.

I was too young to appreciate it, and I had come to listen to the hungry racket of the sea birds and the chopping crashes of the waves on the rugged shore.  I'd never heard those things before, and while they scared me as much as everything else in Colombia, they seemed to be calling me, challenging me.  What for I didn't know.

A hurricane had just broken over Cuba, the hungry August sort that dodged away from Africa and laid waste to whatever got in its way, slipping down to us in the hot grey fragments that tore up our blue tropical sky.  Claw marks, you later called those storms- long, loud things with all the intensity of their parent but none of its consistency.  The sun didn't try to the resist this intermission to its reign over the forests on the edge of the city.  It would rain soon, and heavily, I'd heard a teacher say, and I turned to leave the shore and saw you standing behind me, all gangly boy limbs in khaki and cotton. I thought of you as brown all over, with your skin under your clothes, and your short Colombian hair slick but still unruly with youth.  You grinned at me in my blue ruffled sundress, and addressed me in Spanish.

"Perdoname, señorita."

I tried to push past you and that forced out your Catalan.

"Perdó, senyoreta."

I muttered to myself in French, the only language I didn't hear daily, the language of my grandmother.  You answered me in it, insistent and apparently desperate.

"Pardonnez-moi, mademoiselle."

You grabbed my arm lightly and I shrieked, swinging at you with my umbrella.  You apparently didn't realize how you'd upset me, and tumbled back onto your ass, blinking up at me before running off down the beach, away from my neighborhood, to a different part of the company land.  I stared after you, the fluid insistence of your voice turning into a crackle and hum in my head.  Turning for home, I felt strange, and chose not to think anymore on it.  I glanced back out onto the ocean, towards where the company was building a sea wall.  Tidal power was the wave of the future, they said, and I always cringed at the pun.  You laughed at it later, of course, like it was all very cute.

The next few days, the wind and rain grew angry at our coastline and pounded it relentlessly.  I stayed inside, huddling in my warm room, terrified of the weather, still unused to it after a year of subtle Colombian seasons that made no sense to me.  I missed the winter, and had completely been passed over by the novelty of Christmas on the beach.  Father worried all day and night about the project, a whole week elapsing until he could safely ascertain the state of his investment.

That had been the plan, though- take these hurricane leftovers as they came every year and turn them into electricity, both to benefit the mainland and to secure more research deals with North America.  You explained to me later how much the Americans, Canadians, and even my own Europeans were interested in turning the tide and wind into power.  Our fathers talked about the same things in the same ways, ready for each additional phase as soon as more money came in.  It always took far too long for them, as we grew to understand it.  I remained skeptical and disappointed, while you had that glimmer in your eye to say that I shouldn't doubt.
When the next week had passed, the storms died away, and I returned to the beach, curious about what it would look like on one hand, and curious about what you would say on the other.  Deep down I felt nervous, as much about having upset you as having to meet you out there again.  I took my umbrella as usual, feeling more secure with it now than I had before.

The beach was a mess, covered in driftwood and what looked to be pieces of mortar and concrete from the sea wall, or maybe from homes somewhere else.  The skies were still overcast and hovering between grey and blue.  The sun turned everything strange colors, like it was confused and not sure where to pick up what it had been doing before the tempest came.  I felt uneasy, making my way down the water.  The whole beach was quieter, the sea birds sparse and the waves mysteriously calm.  I kicked at a piece of refuse with my foot, the aftermath unsettling me like it hadn't the previous year.  No hurricanes had broken over Cuba before, it seemed.  After a whole year of adjustment, everything was alien again.
I'd never seen you wear sneakers to the beach before, either, but they were the first part of you I noticed, walking parallel with me on the beach.  I looked up and you jumped, making to leave.  I shook my head, hesitated, and raised a hand in greeting.  You blinked at me the way you had the last time I'd seen you, and I knew then, despite my misgivings, despite the fact that I was a fish out of water (and surrounded by it,) that I should trust you enough to show me the rest of the year.

I did that, for better or worse.  Your father, as I imagined somehow, worked for the same company as my father, hoping for a chance shower of favor from the Americans specifically.  You brought a small boat one day and paddled me out to the sea wall, telling me in whatever language I could stand that day (always French, but you gave me the option) what this thing meant for Colombia and the world- new energy, new ways to take energy out of the dangerous storms of the north, new jobs for the townsfolk in this country's growing industrial sector, new places for European gypsy queens like me to end up.  "Gypsy Queen" you called me, referencing some band from Europe you'd heard about (that I'd listened to all my life, the Gipsy Kings, singing in all the languages we knew and some we didn't.)

I asked you the first time if you meant I was a "gypsy princess," but you persisted in saying "gypsy queen."  I knew what you meant, or thought you meant- I would be moving on sometime for my father's next opportunity.  I doubted it, and in time, so did you, but the name endured.  I never grew to enjoy it, but it was endearing.  To make fun of it, I went to a little store downtown and bought you a postcard from here in Santa Marta, giving it to you and telling you I'd send it to myself if I ever left, but you'd have to facilitate that.  You took it with you, naturally, with a smile.  It showed the hills rolling down to our beach, taken by some forgotten photographer, the trees too green for my taste, the houses scattered about the heights like a child's blocks, dropped from some great toy tower.  I never saw it after you took it home (another place I never saw) after we got back from the ocean barrier that day, the sea spray threatening to soak it, the howling and churning of the waves making me fear for my instructions to you.  I had hope with your laugh at what I said, though.  I'd had to yell, anyway.

They built the first wind turbine on the hills above the beach the next year, but you were long gone.  Another followed the next year, strong enough somehow with its white concrete arms to resist the gales coming in each storm, the inexorable menace here on the coast of the South American continent, taking the leftover power from the great Atlantic.  Seven turbines sit here now, looming high over the village.  Our section of Santa Marta keeps growing, building itself, turning alien to me over and over again.  Postcards started coming in from you, always addressed to the company but with my name on them.  I see you smiling at me from New York, Paris, London, Rio de Janero, even as close once as the capital, Bogota, then from San Francisco and further.  Some of them smell like alcohol and others like perfume, sharp and unabashed.  Always you wear nicer and nicer clothes, your father's ambition poking fun at my father's determination.  You knew you were wrong, too, about your gypsy princess, and you kept sending those things until the time was right to stop, when I won't get them anymore.

I am twenty now, and I have told many things to my boyfriend that you never knew about me.  Like those things, he is something you never knew.  I met him the year you left, the year your father gave up and sought safer waters.  My boyfriend came from Andorra, his family like mine vagrant capitalists panning for gold.  Mother joked that we had him brought over because he was good-looking.  I never thought he was, but I took to him after you left because you'd scared me the whole time.  His jaw was too big, his arms too long, his hair too sandy- it looked like the native dark had gotten dirt on it, and that repulsed me.  But he and I spoke as one, thought as one, were afraid of the same things, like you managed to never be.  He is one year younger than you, two years younger than me.

I am going to break up with him today, on the beach so no one will interrupt us.  He will be angry and he will mention you, and I will tell him that I get your postcards, but that I do not love you, and that I am doing what I have to in order to move forward with everyone's lives.  At least that's what I will tell him.

I'm not sure you'd recognize me.  My fair skin took to the sun finally, bronzing itself after countless painful burns you'd have made fun of me for if I'd have put my umbrella down for very long.  I've stripped my body down to muscle and bones, finally buying a proper Colombian bathing suit, swimming the route out to the sea wall instead of taking a boat.  Mother says I am too thin, but I know that I am strong and I could chase you now, if I wanted to.  The salts of Mexico have turned my hair into curls, every bit as long as it always was but infinitely more interesting and intricate, I hope.  I miss it being softer, and so did my boyfriend.  I got sick of him talking about it, though.  That's what made up my mind to go through with the breakup, not you or the postcards.

I'm standing out on the sea wall right now, going to throw a postcard in a bottle into the sea.  The skies are darkening, the Indies shield letting us enjoy another rainy week.  The storm is coming in this afternoon, but the wall will hold completely, like it did last year, and for the first time it will draw power from the tide, like you thought it would five years ago.  I'm not sure how I feel about it, but it is for the best, I understand.  I cannot hope for you to send postcards forever, so I must take what energy I can from this place and withstand the claw marks on my skin.

The rain starts, and I am ready to move on for my own gypsy queen opportunities, jumping into the ocean while I still have time.  I feel my favorite postcard is coming soon.  From Santa Marta, from myself.