The Southwest: Ponce, Murals & Boquerón

The Drive

Left the hostel before it could talk me into staying another day. Packed up the rental, got on the highway going southwest.

The road opened up into this big American-style highway cutting through green mountains, and my Texas brain kicked right in. 75, 80. Just moving at the speed that feels normal to me because that’s what I always do.

Stopped in Cayey for smoothies at Tito’s Fruit — bright blue and green, held up like trophies in the car. A little moment of sweetness right before the universe handed me the lesson.

The Traffic Stop

Blue lights. Pulled over.

I walked away with three tickets. Speeding — $300, down to $215 if I paid early. Improper lane change. And no documentation, which was really just a misunderstanding and a language-barrier thing, not an actual problem. The last two were the frustrating ones, and trying to fight a ticket as a foreign traveler feels basically impossible. All of it landing on top of an already expensive rental and a toll pass I didn’t even know I needed.

I sat in the car after he left and just breathed for a minute. The universe is not subtle when it wants to teach you something. Stop rushing toward the next thing. Look at what’s actually around you. That’s the whole trip, right there in one traffic stop.

I’d been moving through Puerto Rico at highway speed — consuming experiences instead of actually being in them. The ticket was a forced meditation. Slow down.

Here’s the part I didn’t know yet, sitting in that car doing the math on $450. It never actually came due. The young guy I’d been running around with the first few days had mentioned, kind of offhand, that his dad was a sheriff — a known name on the island. Small island, small police community. My best guess is that’s why the whole thing quietly went away. I never paid it, nobody ever came looking. So the lesson landed without the bill ever showing up, which is either the island being generous or me getting away with something. Probably both.

Ponce

Parque de Bombas is the red-and-black firehouse in the main plaza, and it’s absurdly photogenic.

I went inside. There’s a wishing-well plaque, bilingual, with these funny disclaimers at the bottom — “no eating without gaining weight, no getting rich without working.” There’s an 1899 painting of the heroes of Ponce. The whole building is a time capsule wrapped in red-and-black stripes.

I made a wish. That I’d start actually doing the things I need to do to take better care of myself and my body, every day.

Grabbed food from a street vendor near the plaza — something fried, something perfect.

But what really pulled me in was the streets around the plaza. Murals everywhere. Not the Instagram-bait kind that cities commission for tourism — these were real. Raw, political, spiritual. The kind of street art that tells you what a place actually cares about when nobody’s performing for visitors. Post-Maria. Post-collapse. The walls basically screaming what the news stopped covering.

Ponce murals

I was curious about every single one of them. Even glancing at them as I walked, they hit me somewhere deep — the kind of art you don’t fully take in while you’re standing there but that rearranges something in you anyway, without asking. More meaningful to me than any museum I’ve been to. Art made not to be preserved but because it was urgent.

The Tree

Found a park with a massive old tree — the kind with roots that buckle the sidewalk and a canopy big enough to make its own little microclimate underneath. Sat down under it and opened Courage to Be Disliked.

The part that got me:

When you change, other people around you are forced to change. They may grow to dislike you because you’re not following the same pattern you were in.

I read that three times. Thought about every friendship that quietly faded once I started doing things differently. Every family dynamic that shifted when I stopped playing my assigned role. Every relationship that ended not because of some fight but because I grew and the old shape just didn’t fit anymore.

That’s the cost of following your own script. The people who loved the old draft might hate the revision, and you have to be okay with that. You have to pick the person you’re turning into over the comfort of being the person everyone already knows.

Then the tree cut my hand. Right in the center of my palm. A lot of blood for what turned out to be a pretty small wound. There’s something a little too on-the-nose about bleeding from the middle of your hand while reading a book about freeing yourself from other people’s expectations. I won’t say what it looked like. But I noticed.

Went to a pharmacy for bandages. The calendar behind the counter said: 24 abril: “No estés en un lugar donde Dios no te llama.” Don’t be somewhere God isn’t calling you. The universe was being really loud that day.

The Drive to Boquerón

Southwest corner of the island. Every mile felt further from the Puerto Rico I’d been sold and closer to something real. The roads got narrower, the signs got fewer. Small towns with one bar and a church. Guys selling coconuts out of the back of trucks on the shoulder.

Checked into the Airbnb. Boquerón is a beach town that doesn’t apologize for being small — no high-rises, no chain restaurants, just ocean and bars and people who actually live there year-round.

Got to the beach before sunset. Sandy path through some low scrub down to the water. The kind of beach that doesn’t need a name.

Boquerón beach at dusk

Boquerón Night

I’d met a bartender earlier — born within a few days of my birthday, only a couple years apart. The kind of coincidence that feels like a signal when you’re traveling. I’d been trying to get him to hang out and he was hard to pin down, so I finally tried something different: sent him a couple voice messages and low-key called him out. I get that you’re busy, you probably meet a lot of travelers, I’m just passing through — but I wanted to actually connect. He responded well to the directness. Turns out being honest about what you want works better than performing casual.

He came by the Airbnb and we got ready for the night together, which has its own kind of intimacy to it with someone you barely know in a town you just got to.

El Poblado is the strip. Karaoke, street dancing, cold Medallas. Rainbow flags hanging up casually in bars that aren’t “gay bars,” just bars. No segregated district, no special branding. Sexuality here seems more fluid across the board, more open than what I’m used to on the mainland. That’s what real inclusion actually looks like — not a parade once a year, just a normal Tuesday.

I brought roller skates. Wore leather pants. The mesh-under-harness fit was probably too much for a beach town — itchy within minutes, noted — but the energy was right. Skating through a street party in leather pants while a little drunk is either incredibly stupid or incredibly alive. Probably both.

The bartender, the tree, the blood, the murals, the leather pants. Every one of them a small act of following the script I’m writing in real time instead of the one my anxiety wrote for me in advance, or the one the guidebook suggested, or the one that would’ve made a safe Instagram story.

Al garete.

Back at the Airbnb we put on Sunshine, one of my favorite movies. I said I wouldn’t fall asleep. I fell asleep. The day had other plans for my consciousness, and honestly, after the ticket and the murals and the tree and the blood and the karaoke and the leather pants, my body had earned the right to shut off without asking me first.