My heart is starting to clench in my chest and I wonder if I’m going to have a heart attack right in the middle of Heathrow airport. After spending 80 pounds on a 10 minute international phone call I get the first feeling of white hot panic I’ve ever felt, deep in my stomach I feel terrified. I need to get the fuck out of the international arrival gate teeming with Pakistani businessmen, beautiful nonchalant models, crying babies and trendy London girls with top shop shoes and stylin’ haircuts. I cringe at going into the Duty Free, waiting in line and buying an overpriced pack of menthol cigarettes. I run to the smoking area, reveling in the fact that at least Europe still HAS smoking areas, allowing people to choose their poison. You can smoke anywhere in rural Tanzania.

I find the lounge and Its just me, I’m jonesin’ hard right down to my bones for a bit of quiet and about 2 packs of cigarettes. A fat American comes and leaves immediately. Texan. I stereotype the people who walk by. African American. African. Canadian. As I sit and wait (for what? My flight is hours away) a 6 foot 5 Leatherman quietly enters, just as I use up my last match. Wordlessly, he pulls out an odd foreign lighter and lights my cigarette. I say thanks—and for the first time don’t feel like a refugee in a foreign world, that I’ve found somebody who speaks my language. We start chatting—he’s gentle, but has a face like a saddle, lined and weathered and brown. He looks like he is made of leather, the Leatherman.

I don’t want to talk about myself and living in among a tribe—I’m unenthusiastic about explaining the goat slaughter I witnessed and listening to the horrified reaction, too tired to explain how meat politics don’t exist everywhere. Luckily Leatherman begins to talk. He is not shy and looks me right in the eye. Oddly enough I’m comfortable with this and stare right back. He tells me he is a soldier stationed in Iraq—I’m surprised, because I picture young buzz cuts and assholes with guns fighting the so called War On Terror. With his aging face and gentle American drawl I thought he’d be a teacher, a doctor, maybe even a good-hearted (but ignorant) missionary. The Leatherman’s job is to detonate the bombs the soldiers recover in the desert countryside. He works in a big deserted field. Its dangerous he says, but someone has to do it. Coming out of his lined mouth, it’s not a cliché.

At this point we are trading some cigarettes in our own little world, everyone else entering and exiting the room oblivious to this intense connection two displaced people have when they realize they have found each other. I watch him talk. He is not handsome but with his serene manner and slow moving hands I instantly would trust him with my life, I can’t imagine those hands detonatating bombs. I say I hope he is going home to his sweetheart, an all American doll who is feisty (not quite O’Hara feisty, but they had a ‘meet cute’ when they were young and have stayed together since then), and will bake him a mock apple pie, watch the news, and go on long Sunday drives through wherever he’s from.

He says no, no sweetheart. He found out his daddy is dying, and he’s going home to watch him die, and arrange the funeral. Leatherman corrects himself; it’s not HIS home. I ask if Iraq is his home now and offer him a sip of the 3rd gin and tonic I’ve ordered to calm my nerves. Social barriers that come with meeting strangers are gone. He accepts the sip but says no, he doesn’t belong in Iraq. I comment on my own displacement and he says he can relate and that he doesn’t fit in anywhere anymore, and we both are silent for a minute watching a young family with 2 kids walk by. I feel a bit like crying, and consider asking him if he wants to cancel his flight and move to Dubai where there are tons of lights and everything is new so we could start fresh and be friends. I hold it in and our affable conversation continues. We exchange bad jokes and stories, cigarettes and secrets. Cold drinks.

I have a lump in my throat when he looks at his brown watch and says his flight is coming soon. I am going to be here in Heathrow hell, alone for 5 more hours. The smoking room feels surreal, like it’s not in the airport but some inbetween place. I’ve met one of my soul mates, but in a third dimension where neither of us belongs. I know I’ll never see him again in my entire life and I’ll never find out how he spent the rest of his.

I don’t know what to do, so I give Leatherman my beaten up copy of ‘Lonesome Dove’ that I somehow attained through my travels. I hope the classic western Americana will help him get through his long flight home, where he'll have to cope with cramped seating, his long legs folded up like a mantis.

Leatherman is more effective than 10 gin and tonics in calming my nerves. We shake hands—but it’s not a business deal because we are calmly looking at each other right in the eye, down to the soul, both knowing we’ll never see each other again and this other dimension we are in will close when he shuts the smoking lounge door behind him.

He turns around, ambles away, and that’s the last of the Leatherman.

I go to The Park to escape being haunted by Jose Marti’s ghost in the open air library. I go when my mind gets twisted by the constant Che ‘cliché’ Guevara imagery surrounding me on crumbling school walls, brown arms (though tattoos are banned), flags, the chess hall and torn t-shirts.

The Park is personified by a women I see. A beautiful Carmelita with a deep false-red dye in her hair. Once I get close I realize she has a facial tic and a mouth filled with dented silver– probably from the blockade when she used to eat chicken bones for dinner. Her lips are lined in a dark red, almost black pencil (also used to draw rings around her deep brown eyes). Though violently neon spandex is associated with Cuban women, she is wearing a short tight denim skirt and her partially shaved colt legs gleam underneath as she walks the park circuit. Her shirt is ill-fitting but sparkly and new in comparison to the chipped palm trees and crumbling architecture. Her shoes are cheap and plastic and look uncomfortable but she is a soldier in them, moving fluidly, cat-walking like a super model over the cracked and dirty cement. The ground in the park is littered with broken firecrackers (homemade), Committee of the Defense of the Revolution meeting placards, candy wrappers and torn plastic bags. The Park. People are there to see and be seen—I see adulterers with their secret lovers putting condoms and addresses in each others pockets, and local prostitutes in bright rag tag clothes mixed in with fresh teen couples who have recently celebrated their 15th birthdays and can’t keep their hands off each other. People sit on uncomfortable blue wooden benches, crossing their legs demurely despite the raging sexuality of The Park which is like a captive, untamed tiger ready to burst out of the circus and go on a striped tent rampage, gobbling up infants and terrifying the clowns.

I watch slightly psychotic wanderers who frequent The Park, they aren’t supposed to be dangerous and everyone knows their names but they’ll ask you for things like pens or a pair of pants and they carry knives and I imagine they’d like to carve young women up. In The Park I see a women who shouldn’t be outside alone this late with smeared red lipstick on her face and cataract eyes and wonder if she’s the village witch I’ve heard so much about. Her hands are gnarled, some fingers with long red nails, some with no nail at all. But my attention is immediately brought back to the Carmelita when I smell her acidic flowery perfume wafting by me.

Looking at the Carmelita, I need a cigarette. She’s unpredictable, overly emotional, fierce, confrontational, female. She believes in voodoo– and Christianity, since the pope came in ’98. I watch her strut and think about the plastic rosary she probably has in her handbag. I’m scared of her, fascinated by her and am oddly impressed by her.

This ethereal women with the plastic shoes and numbing perfume. Its hard to imagine her fitting in anywhere but The Park. She IS The Park.