FanStory.com - ...Like the First Timeby Trina Layne

I’m here. It´s already time to meet a virtual lover. Pandemics rerouted my thinking on the viability of a borderless romance. A good Bajan woman or man could go hunting in an ocean as opposed to splashing in mud puddles and getting a dirty face. My big ocean catch has flown across the sea for me.

Here is not an unfamiliar place, but such uncertainty makes the familiar less apparent. It´s a cheerful Sunday afternoon for encounters. Sun dominates the sky. Tarmac shimmers as the ultra-solar beams bedazzle the road surface. The litter of cats in the compressed village square is staked underneath parked cars, enervated from the afternoon´s high heat, and wasting no time on diurnal escapades.

Full-length fitted sleeves misalign with the directives of a tropical September. I pull at the cuffs and roll them semi-carelessly to the elbow joint, underscoring minor triceps forming through narrow sleeves. The low-rise jeans makes an inadvertent splash - baby-blue T-back top crests. Warm wind nudges my thighs. Bouncing swiftly on my calves, I wiggle my whole curvy self back into navy pants.

I start to tread ponderously. My stride has been marginally broken. Unfastened Afro twists twirl thoughtlessly in the sleight-of-hand breeze during this solo walking tour of the square.

Decades-old music from a stereo by the pavement´s edge dances in the wind. The whiff from quick pots tempts weak wills. I half-see pockets of couples amid the open-air cluster of cosmopolitan eating places: at least one pair for Chinese, two more cooing at curries and tikka masala; an odd couple slobbers over a commonly-owned taco bowl. Blenders and steamers in cafés mix and whiz. A marriage of foreign voices resonates between mezzo forte and mezzo piano.

A segment of small children is treated to tall ice-cream cones, almost unconcerned by climate rage, adult romantic lives, and Republican dreams of a leaner Barbados. The children just want their ice cream maybe with nice additions– rainbow sprinkles, gummies, Oreo bits, and cheese bites – to run coolly on their chin and make everything sticky.

My steps relax. I tap my left wrist awkwardly as I come to rest atop a two-step pine platform for unwholesome food choices. The rotating smiling neon chicken sign is like a lighthouse, welcoming consumers past midnight when the international flavors in the village square have stopped their trade.

I must slide a vile-faced mobile, sheathed in a flimsy butterfly phone case, from a faint tan satchel sideways on my snaky hip. It is still a familiar place, at 2:34 pm, one cheerful September-Sunday afternoon, but he´s not there.