On this last day of Fall, I drive the familiar roads etched into the wrinkles of my brain, as fluidly as a deep breath and effortlessly as a sigh of relief. After a gestation period away from this city where the new life that emerged was my own, I find myself at a hexagonal table back in West Dade at the epicenter of my first youth enveloped in the smell of old books and whispered melodies where English and Spanish are one in the same. On the precipice? This invented adulthood where I travel with my partner and live by creating. A once unattainable fantasy now a dream blurring into truth. A reality of our own creation.
On this the wrong way, the impossible way, the road where your guide post is faith and your savior is work there is no fail, just do. From the paradise of this Miami winter I sit and edit photographs from the first Fall I ever knew. Reminiscing about the frigid Pennsylvania air and all I left unfinished there but blessed to have escaped before the brutal winter, it’s hard to see sadness in Miami. But sadness lives in this idyllic version of my home city, in eighty degrees and breezy, because sadness is ever-present in me. But at least, there is the sun.
The prodigal daughter returns, reborn in yellow and gold, to live amongst the trauma of a lovingly flawed neon past. I return to the rubble an instrument of truth, but the clutter around me is a hauntingly accurate representation of the emotional baggage that still lives here.
Every day we peel away at the layers and collectively heal. Bag after bag, discarded, donated, the work so vast that the change is imperceptible at first. Once awkwardly fused bones are broken again so they may properly heal this time around. Painfully, slowly, we shed layers but blossom. Fresher. Grain of sand by grain of sand, we build a beach out of a swampy past; a Flagler Street oasis.
Tomorrow, December 21st, the winter solstice is upon us. Daylight slips into the longest night of the year and the pace of our work intensifies. We no longer work for improvement but for salvation. We work because there is no sun left. Nearing the end of another revolution around this magnificent sun awakens our fear that time is running out, but the fear is unfounded because there is always time for now.
There is always time for renewal. Time to reflect. Time to release the habits that no longer serve us. There is always time to embrace transformation. Time to grow beyond the shackles of our limited thinking. Time to be free. There is always time to dream and find beauty where sadness resides. Time to enjoy sweater weather and when the sun calls, to let flightless birds become unlikely guides.
