27 December 2023
A friend lent me a book that was too easy to read, and another year of my life has gone by. I’ve just finished it, the book, and I suppose the year, too.
Florida smells damp after it rains. I know this sounds self-apparent, but I mean the kind of damp smell where things that aren’t meant to get wet, get wet and stay wet.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt a dry day in Florida. You know, the kind of dry where, if it’s hot, the heat slowly lowers onto you, accumulating in gradations until you find yourself surprised, glazed with perspiration, rather than that humid kind of heat that envelops you, sticks to you as if it’s part of you. Dry like in November when the radiators turn on in New York apartments, and your throat desiccates, and for one week you have a nice, sort of raspy voice before you just become mucusey and ill until March. I don’t think it’s possible – for Florida to be dry. It’s not in its nature.
I always joke that Florida is a “time limit” place, that is, nice for a few days, a week at most, but stay any longer, and you hate the place; come to regret having visited; wish you had stayed in a place with things to do, where restaurants aren’t the size of warehouses, coffee shops don’t offer “JUMBO” sizes, and old men don’t try to talk to you about Donald Trump. I’d take a homeless man or a stoop loiterer calling me “Little mama” as I walk to get groceries over a white man that drives a sports car explaining the Isreal-Palestine conflict to me any day.
It is, admittedly, fun to come home and hone my New Yorker bit, the one where I’m cold, impatient, and distant, observing everything as though I am an anthropologist studying an untouched people – untouched by new ideas such as feminism, gender fluidity, and the difference between a flat white and a cappuccino, the exact sort of things that make a New Yorker seem enlightened in this context and, importantly, only to themselves.
I don’t mind being tropeish, leaning into a character, because it’s only for a few days, a week at most, and it is easier to pretend I’m this other person than it is to convince this white man driving a sports car that I have some nuanced identity of which I wish him to know. I do not wish him to know and neither does he. So we play our little dances so that we might all have stable conceptions of each other, of places, of people from places, and as consolation, for one week in December I get to sit in patches of sun, get rosier in the cheeks, acquire vague tan lines that the New York winter will bleach from me in a week’s time. I am thankful for the warmth and the yearning for home which might not be all that great all of the time, but it certainly isn’t Florida.
I read this to my mom who said, “Then why does David love it here so much?” David is my brother who is gay, lives in London, and is metropolitan in a roundabout sort of way – the one where you dress in an ambiguous mixture of “could be going hiking, could be going to the club, or could be walking to groceries”.
I told her, “I think David just likes being home.”
Home, if you’re David, comes with the benefit of paying for nothing – the most lucrative role within a family is that of the academic – and good Mexican food, of which there is none in the UK. These are relatively easy bars to hit anywhere, geographically, in the United States, but hit especially well in Florida which has pretty decent Mexican food and the added benefit of sunshine, of which the UK is also lacking, especially in the winter months.
The days are almost too long in Florida. I need less hours during which to distract myself from the monotony and pointlessness of existence. I proposed to my mom that we do away with the hours between three and six. I think it’s why the people here are given to drinking. That, and life expectancies are too long now, and there’s too much time to kill regardless of the length of the day.
I texted Marina, who stayed in New York over Christmas to work – she is an executive assistant to a quirky billionaire, and she was on holiday trip coordination duty, but remotely, because she had to stick around for an early Christmas present (the flu).
She responded, “The longer I live this way, the more ridiculous my outfits become.” Referring to her solo Christmas in the city lifestyle.
Marina, since acquiring a pair of speckled, cow-hide leather boots, and frankly before this, has taken to dressing a bit like Urban Cowgirl meets Child Adventurer: bandana tied around neck, coat buttoned to its top. It is quite endearing. She follows up with photos in which she looks precious and has swapped her typical Stetson for what appears to be a weathered suede bucket hat.
I send her a photo of me reclined in a patio chair in the sun wearing the same blue striped button down, black Patagonia shorts, and ballet flats that I’ve worn for five days. “I am dying to be back in New York. I feel my already tenuous grip on sanity slipping.”
“Sea swims?” She questions. The sun does look tantalizing in the photo I’ve sent.
“No! It has been Big Stormy the past few days, this has been our first sun all week…admittedly the sun is excellent today. I am finally going to the sea.”
“What I’d give…my fragile health could use the sea.”
Marina is in those last few lingering days of illness where if she were a decently wealthy woman in the late 1800s, they’d prescribe The Sea, that is, a convalesce by the sea.
“Are you officially off or still sitting atop the clock?” I ask, referring to her trip coordination duties.
“Splayed. Splayed atop the clock,” she replies.
God, I couldn’t have put the feeling better myself.
“I am also splayed atop the clock but because the days are too goddamn long here, and there’s nothing to do.”
I pass whole hours looking at iguanas in trees and the way rivulets of pool water reflect onto surrounding surfaces in murmurations of light and shadow. I’ve changed into my swimsuit which puts me one step closer to the sea and that other way of passing time: staring at waves, collision. I could stare at waves and do nothing else for hours and still feel the day well spent, except I do expire after a few hours at the beach, so my proposition to eliminate the hours from three to six still holds, and strongly.
The sea does, however, still cure all. I text this to Marina, along with a few photos, once I finally make it there, hoping the feeling transfers.
The malaise I had felt all morning – and the previous few days – rinsed right off of me. I felt it pull away as I dove into my first wave. I felt its weight gone as I returned to shore, the water pulling at my legs, then feet, then toes, to stay. I felt its absence in the soft, chalky residue of salt left behind. What a relief that this is all it takes.
Florida can’t help the people who people it. It is just a landmass, after all. I blamed my malaise on place, but as with all of human existence, I think it was just myself – and the weather.
I had come here for sun and received only five days of gloom and enough Trump flags, stickers, and banners to make me forget that Florida is, supposedly, the sunshine state.
At the beach, a blimp flew overhead. I didn’t know they were still doing that. It read, GOODYEAR along its side and not TRUMP, thank god, the universe being kind, for once, and allowing me to stay in my sheltered, sea-cures-all bubble. I wondered if they, Goodyear, did this all year round or just near the start or end of the year, as a little tongue in cheek.
And was it a good year? I don’t particularly think so, but there were a lot of good moments, almost too many to say otherwise, but I’m not sure how we’re measuring Good these days, what the multipliers are for the Good vs. Bad variables in the equation and whether they scale linearly or logarithmically or whether mathematics is taboo in subjective questions such as whether you’d live it all, the year, again, given the chance, and without changing any of the outcomes – you must live it exactly as it was.
It was a good year with bad moments, okay, I’ll concede. But I think I’d pass on living it again, gladly rinse myself of it, preferably in the sea.