Years ago, I met a couple who lived in Miami because of the air. One of them said he couldn’t live in any other climate. You need the breeze, the other man said.
***
For a month, an orb-weaver spider set up shop outside our home; nightly, it built its web next to our front door. The majority of the web was thin, large and round, but on the inside, there were four tracks of woven thread, criss-crossing and moving towards the center. The first time I saw it, my jaw dropped. I called B. over. Do you see this? I said. I’ve never seen this!
***
Behind me, there are thousands of tiny flies. We don’t know where they came from. They are not fruit flies, not black flies, not really even flying flies. They are smaller than a piece of sand; they are traipsing all over the back door.
“That’s insane,” I say to B., as he puts fly tape everywhere.
“That’s Florida,” he says.
***
Sometimes it gets so muggy here that the windows sweat. Or maybe it’s not that it gets muggy but because the AC meets the air, the windows perspire.
The year I moved here, I had remote consulting jobs and no structure. I wrote in the mornings:
There are trees that look like they are made from drippings, as if they’ve been made with batter. The pieces separate like fingers, like bones, like tendons. Sometimes, they wrap around one another. Other times, they create holes in between them, shooting off and arriving at their own piece of ground, all the while responsible for the space in between.
***
When I first arrived, I realized I’d never really seen a sunset. I told my brother that part of the reason I loved Miami was the sunsets. He said, “OK, but the sun sets everywhere.” But I’d never really seen it, I tried to tell him, not in this way. Perhaps that was because I was in love. What I said instead, with all the futility of a person trying to explain beauty, was that it really was different. The way the sun sets in Miami is an announcement: not just of the changing color but of the rays themselves: shooting out from the body of the sun, across the sky
***
When I first moved to Miami, I was without many bearings. I lived in AirBnB’s around the city. B. and I would find one another when we could, and mostly that was after the sun set. We went to movies in theaters that no longer exist and drank beers in bars that are now closed. I had no idea these places would be so fleeting; I had no idea that each place I dutifully tried to become a regular—going more than once a week, sitting in the same stool, ordering my favorite coffee or beer—would be gone, just a year or two later.
I did know I was living in a city that refused permanence. People loved to tell me this all the time—“you know you are living in a city that is drowning, right?” And the answer was: yes. But there was also so much growing. Destruction gave way to buildings; blossoms burst out of decay.
I had left everything I knew to move to the city: my home, my friends, my marriage and my job. People could tell me over and over that I was moving to a place that was falling into the sea, and it didn’t matter much to me. I had built a life I thought was sturdy; then, the surprise of love grabbed me and pulled me away. I tried to stay in what I knew, but found myself jolted into what was becoming. To live in a city on the brink felt right to me—the closer to impermanence, the more at home I felt.
***
Do you know the Wallace Stevens poem about Key West? I’ve been trying to figure it out ever since my father and I visited a year before I moved to Miami. When we visited, I hadn’t yet committed to the idea of living in South Florida, but I was determined to find clues that if I did, I would be making the right decision. Attaching myself to writers was one way to do it; understanding a poem about Key West itself was another way to go.
But I’ve never quite understood “The Idea of Order at Key West.” Is “she” Key West itself? I know poems are not meant to be solved, and I know that even if I did, in fact, want to understand the poem or learn more about it, I could. But for some reason, I don’t want to know this poem except to know it myself.
At the end of the poem, rage appears twice. This part of the poem clicks for me if I ignore the appearance of Ramon (who the hell is Ramon?) and look closely at the repetition of the word: “blessed rage for order…the maker’s rage to order the words of the sea.”
***
When I moved, I came in hot. Some nights, I cried so loudly I screamed. There is an anger to floundering; it is shaped like grief. Those were B.’s words when we left the Perez Art Museum before the event even began. It was crowded. It was getting late. I needed to find a place to eat. He didn’t have a restaurant in mind. I didn’t know anywhere to go.
Months before, I had lived in a city where I knew many places and knew each place that could satisfy any craving. Now, I stood with my back to the water and faced streets I could not name.
I weeped at him. I shook. When we got back to my Airbnb on top of a garage, he said, “I think that was grief.” And he was right.
***
“Do you like it here?” people asked me over and over, and I always said yes. Cars making left turns from the right-hand lane, rain storms causing floods, stilettos forgotten on the beach, people ignoring time, time ignoring people, and the risk of dying by coconut? Yes.
***
I am reminded of my professor in college telling me to write with a more critical nature—to be less rose-colored with my tale. When he told me to be more critical, I was in the process of writing about my grandfather. Now, I am writing about a city. Where they intersect is in my feeling of closeness. I was never especially close to my grandfather, and despite living in this city for six years, I do not feel close to it.
I am still learning. Perhaps that is what creates the haze. Curiosity begets wonder.
***
When we discovered we’d moved next to a house with a mango tree, we were delighted. Fresh mangoes! Now, when mango season comes, I am only somewhat excited; mostly, I am stressed.
Even before the mangoes drop, there is a mess I can’t control: dead leaves, fallen blossoms, and branches. Then, the mangoes start to drop as they grow in weight and size. They come down quickly and without warning; many of them are exploded and rotten; some of them are split; only a few remain whole.
Instead of picking them up every day, I wait for a big haul before I start to gather. Sometimes, when the fruit is no longer fruit, I wonder if I have waited too long—their pits are on the ground and their insides have been eaten and tossed. They look like skulls.
When I bring the whole ones inside, I never know whether to cut around the bruised part or take it and use it for something else. I imagine if I’d grown up in Miami, I would have learned how to handle the mangoes: how to gather them, cut them, use them and store them. But what I usually end up with at the end of mango season is a half a freezer bag of misshapen pieces that become a block of frozen mango days later.
There is so much I will never know.
***
I have learned now that those trees I was writing about in the early days are Banyan trees. They have become no less magical to me, but they have become more common. A friend remarked that I “had a year or two” to take good photographs of Miami. After that, she said, you will lose your sense of newness for each moment, for each thing, and your head will no longer turn.
She is right, and she is wrong. I am becoming more used to this environment; I no longer stop at every bright flower against a blue sky and wonder at the gathering of coconuts (which, if you are wondering, sometimes requires a truck, three men, and a mattress).
I was never able to take a decent photograph of the Banyan tree anyway. Every time I tried, it came out flat. What makes the Banyan’s spectacular is both their largess and their detail. You can’t get too close or you lose a sense of scope; you can’t go too far or you lose the beauty of each and every branch.
Or are those its roots?
