Epistolary Fragments for Florida

Dear nice older folks from Ohio who live in my home,

***

I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want you to come. But now I’m where you were, and you’re where I was, and neither of us are happy. Ours is a liquid landscape though, remember that—it’ll change, and it’ll change you. Maybe one day you’ll even let me come home. I’m not holding my breath though, and you really shouldn’t either—that’s where the worm lives.

***

The New Guinea flatworm, what a beautiful creature.

Long, flat, and black like the gator skulking in your swimming pool. But unlike the gator, it’s an alien in an alien land just like you. And like you, it has no natural predators, so it takes and takes and is never asked to give.

The flatworm likes to squat on your lawn, unconcerned with the cost of living crisis, so the next time you walk barefoot across your bermuda grass look down and you’ll find its slimy body wrapped between your toes. Be a good neighbor and ask it how it’s doing. When it opens its fat mouth to reply, there’s your chance—peer down its throat and into the fleshy chambers that let the beast breathe and you’ll see it. Rat lungworm. Another beautiful creature. A parasite.

Still can’t see it?

Look in the mirror.

***

The first time I ever saw my true reflection wasn’t in a mirror, it was in the swamp water of the Econlockhatchee River. I found it while looking down into water dark like stained teeth, so dark that it hid the underworld of the river’s shallow bed. In that water I saw the wavering ghost of the girl I’d always been and the woman I would become.

I found myself in the solitude of Florida’s wild places; in the longleaf pine forests of Central Florida, amid the saw palms and scorched pines; in the pitcher plant bogs of the Panhandle, amid swarming flies and the stench of death; in the midnight scales of indigo snakes resting in tortoise burrows; in the damp wings of anhingas perched by the swamp’s edge; in forgotten beaches, feeling the world slip away with the sand and seafoam; and in the wind-swept prairie, listening for the song of the scrub jays and the beating of my own heart.

My heart will always be in Florida, shards of it spread across her wild places like leaves that were always destined to return to the earth.

In retrospect, I didn’t find myself in solitude. I found myself wherever you were not, in places that follow laws more ancient and sacred than those signed by the blood-black ink of the governor’s pen. I found myself wherever I could be who I was without the fear of violence lingering like it does for all trans women who call Florida home.

Because out there, the birds just sang of freedom.

***

I don’t mean to make this just about me and you, because it’s a big state. There’s room for all of us, as long as we radically reimagine land use policy. But I feel like I have to make this about you, because when I moved to Ohio, I got a job teaching middle school (something you don’t want people like me to do in Florida anymore) and every day I saw dozens of kids walking down the hallway with home plastered on sweatshirts and tank tops. Pensacola Beach. Destin. Fort Walton Beach. Navarre. Panama City Beach. Except, it wasn’t really home, just the parts you like—beaches and tourist traps. Not the forests and swamps that disappear a little more each year, land swept aside by the rising tide of transplants in need of a new-construction single family home with a nice yard.

At Christmas I drove back down to the Panhandle, back to the region my family has lived in for two hundred years. My car had Ohio plates. I was embarrassed.

I saw yours down there, too.

***

On a different road trip years ago, my wife and I drove down to South Florida to visit my mother-in-law’s childhood home. She grew up in Redlands, back when the land south of Miami was cheap and bountiful. Her family were some of the pioneers that shaped it into the bonsai you love today, acre lots bursting with tropical trees, but her dad sold out before the going got good and bought a few acres in South Alabama, where the only thing redder than the clay was the long-term financial impact of that decision.

On that trip we stopped by Miami and saw the sights you’ve probably seen too—Miami Beach. Wynwood. Little Havana. We got a cubano from a little shop and the woman running it didn’t know English. We weren’t expecting her to. We didn’t know Spanish, and she wasn’t expecting us to. Still, we got along just fine and we got our sandwich. The mustard and pickles were too much for my wife, but I thought it was deliciously sharp.

Florida isn’t just mine—it’s all of ours. So it’s yours, too.

I just hope you understand that when you go to Little Havana. Because if you can understand that, maybe you’ll find it in your heart to invite back the black sheep you culled from the flock.

***

To be fair, it wasn’t just you.

You didn’t single-handedly pass the laws keeping me afar. You’re not the reason that, the last time I went home, I could’ve risked five felonies over three days simply by using public restrooms in government-owned buildings.

It wasn’t even mostly you.

It’s just easier to blame you than my neighbors. The people who are just like me in all the ways that matter—people who fix gumbo for supper and love the woods and country music and the Old Florida that’s almost all gone (each generation pines for Old Florida, something you should know by now).

But it’s easier to blame you than the person I should’ve been. It’s easier to rage at you than look inward at myself and see all the ways the rhetoric that still echos in my heart—fuck them outsiders—the rhetoric I’ve been bringing down upon you in rage—is the same rhetoric that has poisoned you against people like me.

***

There’s an Old Florida seafood bar and market I go out to every time I’m back home. It’s buried deep in the Panhandle down a quiet country highway by the bayou. Whenever the Best of the Region food awards come out, my sister and I side-eye each other into a vow of silence. It is entirely unassuming, nestled next to a motorcycle repair shop and a bait & tackle store. Its sign is classic too, with bright blues and yellows and retro fonts like the iconic Pensacola Beach sign.

The inside is stripped back and busy. On one side are a few chests of ice with today’s pick on display, and in the middle there are a few rickety tables topped with a roll of brown paper towels. On the other side is an old bar decked out with neon, tin beer signs, and New Orleans Saints decor. The cooks are cajun, and the food is the best you’ll ever have—fried shrimp and blackened snapper and crawfish pies at a price you couldn’t dream of finding in a tourist trap.

And now, you’re salivating. You’re wondering where you can find it. You want to take, and take, and take like the New Guinea flatworm, until their prices rise and the locals have to jump ship. Well, you’re just in luck. Through the horrors of AI, you can give it this description and it’ll tell you just the exact location. Or you can just ask the lady from Connecticut. The one working behind the bar.

“The land here is just so cheap,” she told me last time. “And everything back home is so expensive, so it just made sense to move down. We just love the beach, too. And wow—I had no idea you’d been coming here so long. Must’ve been nice to have known it in the old days.”

***

The old days weren’t all great. If you have familial ties to Old Florida, then there’s a good chance that you’re the descendant of confederates, slaves, or both. Violence has long clung to this land like a second skin of sweat; in the Panhandle our landscape is one of blood-red clay and blood-black water.

I know you’ve sensed it. Maybe you like it. Maybe it excites and arouses you. Maybe you’re blind to the genocide that has long happened across this continent, blind to the bulldozing of indigenous burial mounds across Ohio for generations. Maybe you don’t care, and you’re just here for warm winters and margaritas by the pool.

But it’s not like New Florida is great either. All highways and strip malls; transplants who view the rest of Florida an outdoor theme park; tourists of the upper-middle class who flock to actual theme parks that prey on local labor; phosphate mines and off-shore drilling; golf courses and bermuda grass that is far too green; toxic algal blooms from fertilizer run-off; panthers on the edge of extinction; sprawling senior communities that become cities; poor Panhandle towns and wealthy seaside enclaves; locals who turn to drugs or rage in the face of despair; and politicians who deny the same climate change that will swallow our state whole like a pelican.

Still, I love it. Still, I miss it. Still, I can feel swamp water running through my veins, begging me to come back home.

***

You know that it doesn’t thunderstorm much in Ohio. But whenever it does, I open every window in my house, beg thunder to wrap me in its rumbling embrace, and pray for stray raindrops to kiss my cheeks. When I close my eyes, I can almost believe I’m home again, bursting with the hopes and worries of youth that have since faded over the years in Ohio like sand slipping into the sea.

***

Did you get around to talking to the flatworm?

Good. Just don’t try to talk to the manatees. They did that in an episode of The L Word.

Jenny Schecter, someone who is far more unpleasant than either of us, decides to write a story about a girl who talks to manatees. Except when she goes to the aquarium in Los Angeles to watch the manatees, she doesn’t. They say she does, but really she sits there in front of a beluga whale and the entire time everyone pretends they are manatees. It’s like that sad exercise where people gather around the pier at the beach because someone definitely saw a dolphin, and everyone stares out to a half-gray shapeshifting spot in the horizon and pretends like they definitely saw one. They even take a picture, and put it up on Facebook—look, a dolphin, aren’t I so blessed?—because to them, seeing the dolphin is more important than seeing the dolphin.

Don’t try to talk to the manatees. Don’t pretend you understand them, either. Watch them instead, and in the face of their earthly beauty, resolve to be a gentler and kinder being. Watch how the water bends around them, watch the duckweed that dances in their wake, and watch how the water and sky blend together into a unity of blue. Close your eyes and see it; see how the disparate sounds and smells and starburst creatures of Florida bleed together into a greater whole. See how its parallel rivers and swamps bend to embrace in the confluence of the Everglades before slowly bleeding out into the expanse of the sea and all there is. Go out to the prairie of Kissimmee and gaze upon the stars, and see how the stars blend together to form a distant band of the Milky Way. See how it bleeds into the inky depths of an expanse that we are blessed to be a part of, just as we are blessed to be a part of Florida.

Just open your eyes and see before it is too late.

***

Ohio isn’t home, but I have learned to love its red-brick towns, gentle hillside farms, and the skeletons of giants that haunt your cities—remnants of a bygone industrial empire. I’ve come to love my students and their parents, too, because I’ve realized that you’re good country people. I like you. All this time I’ve spent in Ohio, I’ve come to like you more and more. You’re my neighbors here, and my neighbors there. Why can’t we be friends?

Let me come home. Stop with the bullshit and let me come home, and I’ll stop with the bullshit to greet you fully as my neighbor this time. We all lose when we lose each other.

It’s not your Florida. It’s not my Florida. Maybe it’s not even our Florida. Whether we like it or not, it’s the flatworm’s Florida, but thank God it’s also the manatee’s Florida. All the rest of us are sojourners, our hearts bound to the land as it slips back into the sea. So let’s join hands: me, you, and Florida. May God save us from the rising tides and insurance rates alike.

***

Sincerely,

The nice younger woman from Florida who lives in your home