My mother, near the end. Hollowed cheeks. Skin like paper held up to a light. Eyes already doing the long work of leaving while the rest of her was still technically there. The image surfaces the way they always do, sudden, complete, gone before I can do anything with it.
I blink. The ceiling comes back.
The flutter is still there. Smaller now, but there.
Five years of cities and temp jobs and sublets that look like this one, waiting for something to cut through. The numbness arrived gradually. By the time I understood what had happened, I was already deep inside it.
I'm going to Miami because a stranger offered to scare me, and that is, objectively, insane. And also like the first real thing I've wanted in longer than I can properly remember.
I set my alarm for four. I lie in the dark and feel the flutter until I fall asleep.
LaGuardia at dawn is beige and exhausted, like everyone in it.
I move through security in the half-conscious shuffle of early flights, belt in the bin, shoes off, laptop out. The coffee from theterminal kiosk is terrible. I drink it standing at the gate window, watching a plane back away from the jet bridge in the gray pre-dawn light.
My sketchbook is in my bag. I flipped through it before I left the sublet, a barista's hands, a fire escape in snow, a man on the subway who had the most interesting ears I'd ever seen. Quick studies, pencil smudged at the edges. When it's full I'll throw it away and start another. I always do. The keeping isn't the point.
I find my gate. Sit down. Cross my legs.
And think about him.
I let myself imagine it properly, now that the ticket is bought and the decision is made and there's nothing left to do but fly toward it. A room I've never seen. A voice in the dark, low and controlled, telling me what's about to happen and giving me no say in it. The back of my neck is prickling. It's the way your body decides something is real before your mind catches up — the adrenaline arriving, your hands shaking, your breath going short, and suddenly you arehere.
That's what I want. That. The being-here part.
I press my thighs together.
No one knows I'm here. No one knows his name or his address or what he wants from me. If something goes wrong, and something could go wrong, I am a woman alone flying to meet a stranger who wants to frighten her, there is no one to call. No one waiting for a check-in text.
The thought should stop me.
It doesn't. That's the point.
The gate agent announces boarding. I stand, hitch my bag onto my shoulder, and get in line.
On the plane I have a window seat. The East Coast slides by below, gray and winter-brown, and I barely see it.
My skin prickles. Goosebumps rise along my forearms, crawl up to my shoulders. I'm frightening myself with my ownimagination at thirty thousand feet, and it's working, my pulse is up, my breath is slightly short, my body responding to a threat that doesn't exist yet.
I press my fingertips against my inner wrist. My heartbeat is right there, steady and quick.
My mother's wasn't.
Near the very end, she was cold all the time, shivering even under two blankets, three blankets, the extra one I brought from home that still smelled like our house.I'm cold,she kept saying.I'm so cold.The room was seventy-two degrees. I checked. I kept checking the thermostat like the number would eventually make sense. I held her hand and she shivered and I sat there dry-eyed and still, and somewhere underneath the stillness I was already starting to lose feeling, not knowing it yet, not understanding what was happening, just registering a strange quiet spreading through somewhere central.
I look out the window. Florida is below us now, flat and green, threaded through with water, sun hitting the surface of a thousand small lakes. A different world from the gray I left this morning.
The plane begins its descent.
Miami is a wall of heat.
I step out of the terminal and it hits me full in the face, thick and wet, January heat that has no business being this warm. New York in the same month is gray slush and coat collars pulled up. This is palm trees and a sky so blue it looks painted over the real one.
I take a rideshare. Through the window, I clock neon signs for clubs I don't recognize, music from passing cars I feel in my chest before I hear it with my ears, a billboard in Spanish and English both. A city that doesn't bother to pick one language. It sprawls differently than northern cities, more horizontal, more open, willing to show you everything and still keep its secretssomehow. The driver has a radio station on I don't recognize. We don't speak.
The motel is exactly what I expected. I pay cash for three nights and the clerk hands me a key card without looking up. The room has one window overlooking the parking lot, a bed with a green coverlet, a bathroom with water pressure that's more of a suggestion. I set my suitcase down by the door. Don't unpack. I never unpack.
I shower. The heat is good even if the pressure isn't, and I stand under it longer than necessary because I'm not ready to think yet and the water gives me an excuse not to.
