Got a Tickets for my Destination

I have not been home in nearly a year.
Home, if you don’t know, is Miami, Florida.
I don’t like it very much there.

Vague plans to visit at Christmas but I’m afraid of boredom and memories.

Until this morning, when my mother called to say everyone was safe but there was some damage, trees uprooted. The tree outside my bedroom window, a coccoloba or sea grape tree, its pale, mealy smooth trunk and broad, rounded, waxy leaves. The windchimes I hung in the tree and the rustle of its leaves a constant of my childhood nights falling asleep in my room. It’s gone now, impossible to believe.

I have to go home.

Hurricanes are something intensely foreign to most of the people I live surrounded by these days. Today my old roommate asked me to remind again her why we build on a swamp that gets leveled a couple times every year.
I don’t know, it’s a shithole honestly, with mosquitoes, hot, humid. But it is home. And I have to go home.

I don’t know why, maybe it was because not only is there no electricity but also no phone land lines for the first time in the 20 years my family has lived in Miami. But it hit me today, the enormity of being over three thousand miles away while my family is tucked away behind hurricane shutters in my childhood home, the wind and rain ripping into it.

So I’m buying a plane ticket, for Thanksgiving. My father’s birthday is the weekend after and my mother’s birthday is not to long before. A surprise for them, arriving home.