I’ve mentioned a water crisis in posts and shared images on Instagram that got a lot of views (enough to earn me $2.50 from Meta), but going through images of what we ate and drank in June drove home how much that long weekend of dry taps in the middle of the month affected my experience of time: It felt like the longest and shortest month, all at once.

And in Old San Juan, we didn’t experience the worst of it: In Santurce, Cafe Regina has been updating their window with the number of days they have been operating without running water and on emergency tanks. As I write, they’ve gone over 50 days. It is absolutely despicable and part of what feels like a long, drawn-out displacement process, making San Juan unlivable if you don’t have a cistern and a generator. Now, too, they’re apparently going to raze multiple areas of greenery to put in parking lots. You truly can’t make it up: the stupidity, the evil.

As I wrote in On Eating—yes, she has to mention it all the time!—that kind of neglect and misery in Puerto Rico lives right alongside the beauty of impeccable fruit, the closeness of the coffee and chocolate, and coconut ceviche so silky it becomes better than calamari.