Camera phone picture of Hollywood Beach at dusk
I could not write this past week in Miami, even when I felt I needed it, when I believed it would relieve some throbbing, but elusive home anxiety.
I did not take pictures, either. I brought my camera, but I only used it twice. Perhaps I feel that everything and everyone down there has been photographed at some more appropriate time– like any photo I took would be at risk of redundancy. Perhaps, at this point, I am waiting for those approaching landmarks of adulthood, namely weddings, for the photo ops (a depressing thought).
Either way, I had trouble documenting this trip for reasons that seem to speak to my issues with the trip itself, with the problems of coming “home.”
*Nicole picked me up from the airport and drove me to my mother’s new home in what is basically the same neighborhood. I-95 South to Ives Dairy Road to Biscayne Boulevard. Traveling down these streets is like running into an ex-boyfriend. They are so familiar, you have shared so much with them, that you know they must be just the same. And yet, with that daily routine of dependence long broken, the closeness gone, you are the most eerie kind of stranger.
*”White is out,” my mother told me, explaining why she painted the walls in her new apartment a dark, murky gray. The apartment has low ceilings, and most of the rooms come off one of two winding, narrow hallways. I heard my mother yell “Hello?!” down into one of them, all the way to her bedroom at the end of the hall. My sister informed me that she does this all the time, yells “hello” all the way to her room, and we laughed at her, but it makes sense. In those dark gray caves, she must feel like she is spelunking.
I hate the place. I do not have a room there. I am supposed to sleep in a tiny nook squeezed between the AC closet and the pantry, on the opposite side of the house from where all the other bedrooms are. Its proximity to the air conditioner also means that it is at least twenty degrees colder in that room than in the rest of the house and that the large piece of machinery bangs and thuds all night as if it were a poltergeist. Instead, I started sleeping with my sister. She has taken many of the flimsy, yellowing scraps that used to hang in my old pre-adolescent room, salvaged them, and hung them as her own. It is sort of adorable, so I let it go that she has pilfered my thirteen-year-old identity. Besides, it is the only room in the house where I feel the least bit comfortable.
The apartment is not a place for comfort, or a place for activity of any kind. It is a place for observation (and admiration) of my mother’s collections of things. To do anything there, even to cook, is to disturb something pristine and expensive. My brother and I rail against my mother’s gaudiness from the only comfortable place in the house, the beds. And each bed faces a new HD flat-screen TV, so we watch it. Five hours later, after a “Scrubs” marathon and one half of “Legally Blonde,” I conclude that most of everyone must actually be brain-dead to be watching this crap.
*The only redeeming part of the new apartment is the view. Our balcony is both private and beautiful, facing the Atlantic. I spent most of my time at the apartment out on the balcony with friends. From there, you can see the bay and the ocean, with a strip of what is called “Golden Beach” between them.
“So your mother has pretty much said ‘fuck you’ to the tidal wave theory,” a friend joked. But I can’t say I thought it was very funny. I love the balcony, but thoughts of this nature had been intrusive since I returned to Miami. The ocean– hurricanes, tsunamis. I think of that same view of Golden Beach, as it would be when the bay and the ocean reach out to one another, drowning the majestic homes on the strip in their embrace.
I realized it isn’t just the view that makes me feel this way. Miami in general has roused the old school apocalyptic rumination in me– the crowds of people, the traffic, the ominous coastline construction, the giant lit-up casino complexes. Spartanburg, though not exactly country life, has suppressed my tendency to see destruction in everything (save in one isolated trip to Wal-Mart). It reminds me of something I just read in The New Yorker. Paul Watson said that art and culture are “worthless to the earth.” So while cities are arguably the most stimulating place for human life, they are also the most dangerous. It was the way I used to see New York, but have never seen Spartanburg. Everything I pass– underwater, collapsed, abandoned.
*In that light, Thanksgiving was hard. There were 60 + at my uncle’s house, and there was food for three times that number. Whenever a serving tray grew empty and mangled, a tiny hired woman would fill it up again from an even bigger tray. It was a flawless illusion of infinite abundance, which inevitably led me to think about the point where there is nothing left. How many Thanksgivings until then?
*A friend that I used to hang out with in high school died in his sleep on Saturday. They suspect it was an overdose, but there is some debate. My junior year of high school, he plunged into a drug-related coma that lasted for months and never fully recovered. He is not the first I’ve heard about to go out like that. It seems people from high school fall into two categories these days: law school or drug-induced failure. I can’t help but blame Miami for this– there is nothing that city idolizes if it isn’t money and a good party.
*I take nothing for granted anymore. When Brian called to ask what I was doing, he always seemed surprised if I was on the beach. “It’s Miami,” I kept trying to tell him, “It’s always warm.” But even as I said it, I myself was surprised by it. I remember packing the night before I left. I called Nicole at 2 am and asked her if I needed a sweater. “Come on, Arielle,” she said, “It’s Miami.”
I found myself wanting to take pictures there in the same way I have been photographing Spartanburg for the glass paintings, but for inexplicable reasons, did not feel up to the task. I had somehow never paid attention to the seedy, neon motels from the 50s that line US 1, or the decrepit restaurant shacks that cater to the French Canadians on Hollywood Beach. I remember someone telling me that people in Spartanburg don’t even notice how beautiful the old mills are. I realized I had achieved real distance from Miami. It excited and depressed me. I will take the pictures another time.
And so many images functioned this way– the little nuances of Miami that I once normalized became standout signals of a particular world and worldview. What complicated my reintroduction to these images was the admission that it was a worldview that, in effect, created me. A boy at a major intersection midday with untinted windows, taking bong hits from the driver’s seat of his otherwise empty car while stopped next to me at a red light. A blaring Reggaeton party next door to my friend’s house being broken up by police. A girl of indeterminate age wandering into the gallery where I used to work in high-heels, dazzey dukes and a french manicure and people actually taking her seriously. That’s Miami. Throw in the 2 Live Crew and you’ve got the whole picture.
Camera phone picture, birds flown south
In the days before I left, I had a dream. It was about my first love, that one that you never really let go of. He was dead of an overdose (surely inspired by current events) and although I had not seen him in years, I decided to attend his funeral. A new girlfriend was there, with a two-year-old son that I didn’t even know he had. There were pictures of him hung around the church and I studied them to see if I could get a sense of the person he had become, but also to see if I could recognize anything familiar in them, if I could see myself vaguely represented in any of them. His mother was there, in bed even in the church, because she was too grief stricken to get up, and I approached her and expressed my sympathy.
At the risk of sounding too much like a cheesy pop-psychologist, I do think the dream was significant. I have been cultivating this idea about “first love” as it relates to the transient concept of “home.” I am, in fact, currently trudging through an essay about it. In the case of this dream, would it be too much of a stretch to say that one is a direct stand-in for the other? The dream disturbed me, hung like a dark cloud over the rest of my day. I felt like I wanted to contact the boy, to make sure he was ok, but I knew it had nothing to do with him. I felt somewhere that it was about “home.”
Miami, despite the sometimes intensely sentimental love I feel for the people and places within it, is not home anymore. It just isn’t. Maybe it will be someday again, but it isn’t right now. I am in the market for a new home. Any suggestions?
Thu 27-Dec-07 