Girl on the Brink: Surviving Desperate Times with Desperate Measures

ANN’S NOTE: I wrote this entry in March but was too embarrassed to post it. I took this trip soon after my boyfriend broke up with me.

What do you do when you’re in your 50s, got less than $20,000 in retirement, $500 in the bank and credit cards near their max? Why, you buy a roundtrip ticket to Puerto Rico. Cha, cha, cha. I thought of making it one way, but that would be a total shirk of my responsibilities, and think of the children.

You say crazy. I say mental health break. There is no expense too minor for me not to rationalize why I need to run my credit card through the scanner. After all, I can do for days without spending a dime, literally. As long as I hole up in the basement apartment and wait for the first of the month, when my Electronic Benefit Transfer car…, oh, let’s just call it what it is, my food stamp card, is loaded with another $176 for the month, I’ll be all set to eat empanadas again.

Seriously, I am flying to Puerto Rico, to visit my girlfriend, who’s there on a work assignment. Thank goodness she’s called because I was just about to call my therapist for some head talk. She charges $160 for 50 minutes. She’s not one of my Medicaid-approved providers, so I’d need to find another shrink if I want Medicaid to pay for it. I’m not ready to do that.

I don’t see how I made the wrong decision when the choice was between surf, sand and sun, and a good chat. What’s more, my girlfriend’s company was paying for the hotel room. My expenses were next to nothing, except for some el tapóns I had to buy at Walgreens during the middle of my trip.

Every morning, filtered sunlight entered through the hotel window facing the sea. Small waves rolled in and broke against the sand. Off on the horizon, a cruise ship sailed to its next port; a deep-sea fishing boat closer in sped by. Waves broke far off the shore and then returned for an encore by the sea wall. I felt nourished by the air and fresh fruit for breakfast.

My girlfriend still had to work, which was all right with me. Heck, I’d much rather be a chica in San Juan than a white girl on the bus in DC. I felt good about my accomplishments while “working” (wink, wink) less than an hour’s flight from St. Barts, which we spent three hours figuring out how to get to so we could buy Pan de Sucre French bikinis. Worth the $150 price tag, especially the one with the push-up bra, and we were thrilled to find out that we only needed to fly as far as St. Maarten to buy them.  Our thoughts soared with anticipation of shopping and splurging, which gave both of us a much-needed mental lift.

I swear I know every puddle jumper in the Caribbean. But American Airlines had the best deal. It flew direct but only once a day at noon, which was the deal killer. It was already 11 o’clock. The other airlines had overnight layovers. We couldn’t stretch the trip out that much because my girlfriend had to go back to work on Monday.

After exhausting our options, we took a walk on the beach instead. We shrugged our shoulders and let out a collective sign when the bikini bubble burst. The sun in San Juan shines just as brightly as the sun in St. Maarten, and the airlines saved me $150 I didn’t have.