Sunsets & Sirens: A Bayamón Boy’s Truth

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Today's narrative is on Sunsets & Sirens: A Bayamón Boy’s Truth

They sell Puerto Rico like it’s a living postcard: Old San Juan draped in pastel paint, sunset concerts where happy couples sip rum on warm stones. I’ve seen the same glossy images on bus billboards and glossy travel mags, but I grew up three bridges away, where no one asks my address and no one photographs our streets.

My earliest memory is the roar of tour buses rolling past our barrio at dawn, their engines drowning out the roosters. I’d press my face against our rusty gate, imagining the faces inside—sunburnt, wide-eyed, expecting salsa and palm trees, never the flicker of broken streetlights.

Home was a two-bedroom cinderblock shack with a corrugated roof that rattled in every rainstorm. My mother clawed extra shifts at the supermarket just to keep the fridge humming; my little sister slept on a mattress on the floor. The windows never shut tight, so I learned to fall asleep to whispers I wasn’t supposed to hear.

Around the corner was a house that nearly collapsed under the weight of empty bottles. Neighbors sold pills out of plastic bags, and word traveled fast: one wrong knock could end with sirens or sobs. I tip-toed past that ruin every morning on my way to school, wondering how many dreams got sold there before breakfast.

At school, the fans whined like hungry insects. Our books had dog-eared covers and missing pages, but the teachers tried. I loved math most, because numbers don’t lie about how much you have—or how much you don’t. Outside, graffiti spelled names of lost friends; inside, we pretended those names were just art.

Sometimes a police cruiser burst down our street, its siren a thunderclap that raised gooseflesh on my arms. We ducked behind front doors, hearts pounding like steel drums. Tourists in San Juan heard only maracas and laughter; here, laughter sometimes came with a side of fear.

Still, we found our own rhythms. We played pickup basketball on cracked courts lit by a single bulb. Children with scuffed shoes and chipped smiles passed the ball under a sky that never promised safety, only the next afternoon’s heat.

My abuela held the best parties: arroz con gandules, story-telling circles, songs about home. Her kitchen smelled like spices and hope. For a few hours, we forgot the bullets in the alleys and the neighbors we wouldn’t see again.

I once snuck onto a bus bound for San Juan, hiding my gas-station sneakers in the luggage rack. When I stepped off, the air felt different—cooler, sweeter, as if I’d crossed into someone else’s dream. The cobblestones under my feet whispered of history and tourists’ selfies, but they didn’t whisper back.

I chased that feeling of belonging for years, scribbling poems on scrap paper, drafting letters to magazines that never answered. Every rejection stung, but each word reminded me I wasn’t invisible, not entirely.

Now I realize those postcards weren’t lies—they were just half the story. Puerto Rico is both beauty and brokenness, glittering Caribbean vistas and barrios haunted by loss. It’s the two worlds overlapping on one small island.

I carry both in my voice. When I write about palm-fringed beaches, I remember the night a neighbor’s gunfire cracked the air. And when I describe cracked sidewalks, I see tourists clicking their cameras, blissfully unaware. That tension is my truth, the thread I’ll follow until someone listens.

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