Air was caught in my throat, the bubbles piercing my chest trying to escape. I can’t breathe.
The sound was like a freight train ripping by and I couldn’t even hear my own panic anymore.
Flood water was gushing into the house from under all the doors; it was becoming clear that bath towels would not hold back the carnage outside.
I started my retreat upstairs. We were in the middle of an evacuation zone. We had been for 24 hours, but as my mother said, “Real Floridans don’t leave during a hurricane.”
I drained the emergency drinking water from the bathtub and we both climbed inside, pulling my bedroom mattress overhead to brace ourselves against whatever debris might fall on top of us.
Soaking wet, we stared at each other in silence for the next two hours, waiting to see if we would survive as a hurricane consumed our home.
Even after that, years after that, we never did leave, and she never regretted it.
A few days later, when the ocean still occupied the land and the neighbors remained absent, I floated down 85th street on an inflatable pool raft to catch lobsters.
...
In that particular moment, in that particular dimension, space is composed of the confluence and non-confluence of flows.
Different viscosities of aether moving us as we navigate through the world and locate ourselves within it.
As we move - as we caress the aether - we too characterize and create it.
What memories and hauntings are left in our paths? What and whose residues are we navigating through?
...