The Sea, the Verse, and the Unforgotten Sunday

Sundays smell like the sea to me, like a coastal town, like the fury of waves grazing a city that sleeps knowing the blue of the Caribbean Sea watches over it. Every Sunday should resemble this one, tangled in my memory, which I now bring to this community I adore #weekendexperiences.

It wasn’t my first time visiting Nuevitas, the northern port city of Camagüey. I’m talking about the city once most coveted by corsairs and pirates who skirted the island in search of treasure. I’m talking about "Nuevitas la bella"—its cobblestones worn by time, its colonial houses whispering tales of smugglers and high tides. It wasn’t my first visit, but it was the first time every inch of its geography ensnared me, as if the sea, in its eternal ebb and flow, had decided to carve its name into me with salt and foam.

I was attending a poetry festival back then. We moved from event to event, reading to reading, climbing steep streets that seemed to want to lift us closer to the sky. We wandered through galleries where art smelled of old wood and fresh oil, museums holding echoes of sunken ships, parks where palm trees swayed the wind like verses in motion, and churches whose walls, weathered by salt spray, held more silence than prayers.

With every pilgrimage, verse in hand and the sea nearby, I could feel myself leaving a piece of me behind. As if every poem read, every corner discovered, every laugh shared under the Caribbean sun became an offering to the waves. And the sea, generous, returned to me fragments of peace I hadn’t known I needed.

Facing the sea has always been a balm for my soul. There, between the endless murmur of waves and the horizon melting into infinity, I find the silence necessary to untangle my feelings, the uprootings, the accumulated and unhealed wounds. To feel the salt on my feet, that rough yet tender caress; to notice the sticky coastal breeze on my skin, as if the air itself wanted to linger; and to touch the murmur of the waves, that ancient language speaking without words—it’s a sensory experience beyond limits.

That Sunday, as the sun dissolved into the water and poets recited verses at dusk, I knew Nuevitas was no longer just a dot on the map. It had become a heartbeat, a memory I’d carry in my skin like salt that never fully washes away, not even after a shower.

Because some cities aren’t visited with your feet, but with your soul. And some Sundays don’t end when the sun sets—they stay afloat in memory, like a paper boat in the Caribbean.