El Zonte

Hien Mindy Nguyen
Jun 10
3 min read

I didn’t come here to be seen. I came to disappear a little. To lay my tired bones somewhere the world couldn’t reach me. No big gestures. No grand plans. Just salt in the air, sand in my shoes, and a heart quietly asking for softness.

El Zonte didn’t ask me who I was, or what I’d come running from. It didn’t require my smile or my strength. It simply opened itself to me- humid, wild, and aching with a kind of quiet that feels like understanding. Like an old woman who’s seen everything, who lets you cry into her shoulder without saying a word. Who just rocks you. Lets you fall apart without trying to fix it.

I arrived carrying the kind of ache that no longer has language. The ache that lives in your spine. That follows you into sleep. I was unraveling slowly, at the seams. But no one here asked me to explain. Not the woman who brought fresh tamales to our porch. Not the surfers who threw peace signs with sunburnt lips. Not the skinny dogs who walked beside me at dusk and then vanished like ghosts.

Even the sky felt sacred in its silence.

But that storm,

That storm came like truth.

It rolled in slow, like a secret I hadn’t let myself say aloud. Thunder curling at the edges of the horizon, the wind whispering something ancient in my ear. I stood barefoot in the dark, the air thick and humming, and watched the sky break open. Lightning lit up the waves in flashes - huge, feral, crashing against the black shore like grief with nowhere else to go.

And I

I felt so small.

So gloriously, insignificantly, wildly small.

For once, I didn’t have to be the container. I didn’t have to be the strong one, the graceful one, the woman with all the answers. I just stood there, drenched in salt and storm, and let the sea roar for me.

The sand was cold that night. Wet and clinging. The kind of sand that sticks to your skin like memory. I sat with my knees to my chest, watching wave after wave collapse and rise again, and thought - maybe healing isn’t some tidy thing. Maybe it’s this. Letting yourself break open under a sky that doesn’t need to know your name.

In this little town, I met women with fire in their bones. DK, calling me baby girl and trying to laugh through the bruises on her heart. Jennifer, still a child but with a gaze that carried lifetimes. Her grandmother, all grace and weariness, wrapping her arms around us like we’d always belonged there. We didn’t speak the same language, but we understood each other, in tears, in laughter, in the way we shared pupusas and made a table out of nothing.

And the food, pupusas, hot off the griddle, cheese stretching between each bite, made fresh by hands that know how to care without asking questions. I’ve always been the one who cooked for others, folded love into every dish without needing it returned. But here, someone else made the meal. And I felt it, not just in my mouth, but in the part of me that was starving for gentleness. This wasn’t just food. It was offering. It was belonging, served warm on a plate.

No one here asked me to be strong. So I was soft. So soft, I almost forgot I had edges. And in that softness, I grew. Not louder. Just clearer.

Ten years ago, Rome cracked me open.

But El Zonte

El Zonte held the pieces in her palm and whispered, You don’t need to go back to who you were. You’re allowed to become someone new.

And I believed her.

This time, I didn’t write to be remembered.

I wrote to remember myself.

Not the version the world adored- the one who performed joy even while drowning.

But the version who sits barefoot in the sand,

quiet, tired, real.

The woman who doesn’t chase love anymore.

The woman who makes sacred the act of just being.