The Hidden Oasis
I spent this long weekend at a guesthouse in Wilton Manors; a staycation if you will. K and I were going to make a trip to bookend the end of my sabbatical and a job well done for Kareem's accomplishments, but between the gout attack and his work not stopping, K found a vacation rental on Airbnb with a pool and a hot tub, and our friend Royce flew down from Chicago.
The house we stayed in was kinda cute in a beachy, generic white married couple on Pinterest sort of way. Piece of wood painted "It's 5 o'clock somewhere?" Check! Wicker starfish accessories? Got em. It had all the necessities for a self-proclaimed "Hidden Oasis" clearly owned by an older wealthy gay Canadian couple, with the pool, a hot tub, rainbow hammock, and shitty plasma television with a million Xfinity channels but no Roku stick for Netflix.
Wilton Manors may only be a twenty-minute drive away from Miami, but culturally it may as well be a million miles away. It's the gay ghetto of Fort Lauderdale; imagine The Castro, in San Francisco, with bars and stores in little gay strip malls. Now, take away the women, trans folk, or genderqueer folks, every person of color or anyone under the age of 45. Now imagine them all in tank tops.
That is Wilton Manors. Welcome!
All of that said, these are waters more familiar to me. I've all but given up expecting to see people around here who look like me anywhere in South Florida. But I am a gay nerd, the type that plays German board games with fifty page manuals. Nerds are a rarity in Miami, much less gay nerds. Also, most folks in Wilton Manors are initially from the Midwest, and given that I'm Asian and from the West Coast, I speak fluent Passive-Aggressive. Want to be pleasant to my face at a Starbucks, and then be super racist behind my back? Sure, why not? Hell, I'm slandering you on the internet right now.
This weekend was spent in a hot tub, doing a lot of thinking. It's been seven years now since I've lived in Miami. Most of the people super into living here always ask lead-in questions: “how much do you love living here?” And I smile and play along.
Living here in Miami has been okay! Just okay.
I equate it to the sevens stages of grief. I'm long past the shock about how different things are, anger about everything I interpret to be wrong about the city, and the bargaining — oh, so much bargaining.
Nowadays, I fluctuate anywhere from reflection to acceptance, depending on a whole host of internal and external factors. I'm fully aware that no town I live in will be perfect, that depression doesn't go away just because I move to a new city.
When my energy levels are up, my mindset is one of "okay, let's do this. Let's try to make this whole living in South Florida thing work." And the brain starts cycling through ideas of things I can do, organizations I can join or create. That's about the time I realize that I've done a lot of stuff the past couple of years, and the thought of spinning my wheels again sound exhausting.
I imagine a scenario where I return to the Bay Area, where I'm pretty sure the following would happen: I move back into the suburban condo my dad and I purchased together back in 2006, the one next door to the strip mall with the Safeway and the two Chinese supermarkets five minutes from my parent's house. I'd probably spend the next forty years running their errands and mediate their fights. (They'll both live until 120, obviously, since their hate for each other will pickle them forever.) I could obviously try to live somewhere else in the Bay Area, negotiate rents, compare leases. But that would require a different job, one that pays Bay Area salaries, and then we're back to that whole that path of least resistance thing. I also remind myself that I have a reliable friend base back in the Bay Area, and I really love burritos. Would all this drama be worth friends and burritos?
Before you know it, I'm caught in a tailspin.
So, right now the way I'm handling everything is by focusing on the present. I'm taking a couple of deep breaths. I imagine myself back at the Hidden Oasis, sitting by the pool. I've applied three pounds of bug spray, yet I feel my skin twitch from the mosquitos circling my legs. The bugs are ready to strike any moment, taunting my skin into transforming into a valley of bright red welts. I know I should probably dip in the pool or run into the house. Instead, I stare at the ripples on the swimming pool, close my eyes, accept the inevitable.