It was about time I saw the sea. In a life this distinctively silver, sometimes so green, it is the Atlantic that knows how to heal a disaster. Today I woke up early enough to see the bend in Miami, the horizontal light drawing palm trees on the walls, a christening of gold over the city. I can’t find joy in seeing this time of day: it is by an overwhelming someone-else that I can’t sleep, the beach hobos (Florida’s main attraction) lay undisturbed and dewy on park benches, the air blows too cold to swim.
I am here for the same snob reason everyone else is. I wish I could say it is to listen to the Atlantic crash into foam from a cuban restaurant on Ocean Drive, but it is the first week of December. The warm sand is just inconvenient to a CVS run when you’ve spent four days in a booth, the art on the fake walls taste of tars and metals, each day the sun finds new places to hide.
On Friday I took a detour while running an errand I knew I could use as an excuse for a long break. In the sun the blonde earth blazed, I was wearing this grey suit and black boots. I walked in the direction where people red polka dot the sand, I only saw white beyond my black bangs, there was the smallest ringing in my ear; a delusional gallery assistant dropped in the desert after an opening reception. Except it was impossible to sweat-- I felt trapped in this dehydrated skin, exhausted and deranged, convinced that magic bred inside the canvases and frames not the price sheets, not the business cards or dinner invitations. I hated the Edition Hotel! The Patek Philippe watches! Talking about tape on a fucking banana. Nothing was more profane than green until a wave hit my knees; I only saw two splendid, squeezed blues.
Last year on Christmas day Queens felt more distant than usual. Had I taken the A train so far that my life couldn’t reach me? I realized how much I liked that. So please, get on your skateboard and go somewhere, for the love of God, anywhere. It was the magic that pulled me south, there was no cold in the new places you go to, all nights are bright, you’re not alone, just unknown. I only knew the bay in its summer green, and when I rested at a canopy after its first bridge I cried, I swear, and in the lights from the airport I faced glitter back onto the dark bike-highway.
Could it be that I had been in my own delusion, that whole time? How when the stars are out they aren’t actually blinking for me. How none of this is inherent, and my body moves simply because I tell it to. What about the last bridge, the one past the boat houses and all those irish families, did it remember that for the first time in ten years I was crossing it? From it you can see the perfect black of the Atlantic. Whose was it, then? If the Rockaways can’t fit from teeth to teeth, and a woman picks up seashells for her husband on their beach; then I’ll lay there in the sand where the crabs feed, the foam reeks, and the moon will be the only one to know me.
12/25/2019 6:15PM