Bourdainism in San Juan: The Art of Being Witnessed

Dear Reader,

Here’s the thing about building an entire identity around solo travel: eventually, someone shows up and ruins it.

I brought a friend to Puerto Rico. Oneisha Lee, aka. @shapeyourbliss— and if you’re expecting me to apologize for breaking brand, you can stop reading now. This one needed a witness.

But first — I owe you an explanation for the silence. I took a break. Not a cute, curated “I’m on a journey” break. I realized I had a codependent relationship with writing. The pen was my morphine, and trauma therapy doesn’t let you keep your favorite crutches. So I put it down to see who I was without the hit.

Turns out: peaceful. Weird, right? I had to sit with the terrifying possibility that a happy writer might still be a good one.

Anyway. Puerto Rico.

There is a safety in solitude. I’ve built a life on it, and I’m good at it — the endless hobbies, the self-entertainment, the ability to eat alone at a bar in a foreign country and feel like the most interesting person in the room.

But there is something else entirely about the Art of Being Safely Held and Witnessed.

I can’t count how many times I’ve written about loving a person’s idiosyncrasies. Oneisha has plenty, but my favorite is that she chases sunsets. Not photographs them. Chases them. She will reroute an entire evening for the light.

She reminds me of the color blue, and not the sad kind. The sky kind. The medium her sunsets get painted across. The ocean kind, with depths you feel all at once before you can name any of them.

Sharing a bed with someone for a week does something to your defenses. There were flashes of vulnerability I wasn’t planning on. I started sharing bits of my mind, the chapters I don’t usually read aloud, and Oneisha kept unraveling like she was waiting for the next page.

After spending over a year married to someone who made me feel like my emotions were either fundamentally flawed, deeply inconvenient, or amazing — nothing in between, ever — I had braced myself into a smaller shape since 2023. Shrunk the wingspan. Kept the interesting parts filed away where they couldn’t be used against me.

I held my breath, waiting for Oneisha’s judgment.

She just wanted more.

She wrote in her journal that night — about how resilient I was, how fascinating my mind was, how inspired she felt. I know this because she told me, unprompted, like it was obvious.

Reader, I think that took more out of me than any solo trip ever has. Being witnessed is exhausting in a way that loneliness never is.

On one of our walks, she said: “You had every reason to give up. And you just… refused.”

And I found myself laughing. “Yeah, well. I just love life too much to give up on it. This feeling, right here.”

I guess this was supposed to be a love letter to Puerto Rico, but it became one for Oneisha Lee instead. The island will forgive me. It’s generous like that.

One thing I will say: there is a cluster of bars, recommended by a handsome devil running the dumpling stand near our hotel, and I won’t name them here because I want them to stay local as long as possible. But friends — when I tell you it was the most alive block party I have ever walked into, I mean it. Speakers wired to the outside of houses. People dancing around cars that were driving straight through, neither party fazed. The kind of night that doesn’t need a plan because the street is the plan.

I suspect Oneisha and I will travel together again. The solo brand will survive.

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There is a sentence I wrote weeks ago that won’t stop circling: “Freedom is available, yet you still bargain with the cage.”

Oneisha left before me, and I spent a day alone with my own thoughts. Exhausted, walking through Old San Juan in heat that felt personal, I nearly collapsed and decided — with the dignity of a woman nursing a mild hangover — to lay on a park bench, read, and sleep.

It reminded me of the days I was homeless, and I sat with that for a minute.

A family of four walked by. The mom leaned down to her kids — a girl and boy who looked like twins — pointed at me, and said in English: “Yes, she’s so cool, isn’t she? With her bracelets, and all of her tattoos, and wow — her hair too!”

The little girl said, “She’s so cool. I want to be like her.”

I think that’s about all I can wish for in this lifetime.

I got back to Austin safely. One of my childhood friends just moved here, and we’re sitting in a bar filled with books, daring each other to be creative, and I’m holding back words so I don’t tell you every beautiful thing that’s happened in the past two weeks, every goal already checked off the list.

In these dark times — what more could I wish for?

Thank you,

Suki