We watched Discovery piggyback a Boeing 747 against a purple-pink sky from a hospital window on an early April morning.

It was headed to its final resting place in Washington D.C., the area I had left in 2008 to move to the Space Coast. The end of the Space Shuttle era marked the birth of our daughter. All of the stoplights across the 520 Causeway had been green. Knowing how long it normally took to drive past blocks of shopping centers that blended into one another, it felt like a small miracle.

I imagine our stories like a physical presence. Layers overlapping, paths converging, only separated by time.

I realized this the second day after my daughter’s birth, when I walked down to the edge of the Indian River wondering what the hell I had gotten myself in to, feeling so overwhelmed and tired. And again, driving along the river bank, sun shining, water still flooding the pavement weeks after Irma had come and gone—much the way trauma lingers in the mind and the body long after the event passes. Even when the sun is shining.

Florida was the way I discovered and grounded myself. Photography has been how I communicated my loneliness when words spoken aloud felt like an impossibility. 

I coped with struggles by opening myself to the experience of the outside world. The baggage of a lifetime of a thousand tiny cuts, and the collective denial of a slowly drifting marriage allowed me the freedom to walk for miles down sidewalks to the river, soaking up all the sights that an old, miserable but wonderful decaying suburb could provide. 

There is an indescribable feeling when I think about these streets, strip malls, and wide, desolate, urban spaces.

Walking down Fiske Boulevard, discarded litter telling stories measured in feet. Wawa cups turn into Swisher Sweets, losing lotto scratchers, Capri Suns and candy wrappers. Or the back of the Chinese buffet next to the Family Dollar (two hold-outs supporting an otherwise empty strip mall) a potted papaya tree covered in fruit and a bouncy horse by the back service door. 

The night sky filling with orange and fire while I watch through palm trees and moss-covered live oak. My feet covered in ant bites, bats whizzing by my head, only illuminated by the light of the launch. I felt so earthbound listening to the SpaceX feed as the control room filled with cheers from people who have likely never stepped foot on these sidewalks. I watched until the glow of the booster faded into nothingness and was swallowed into the blackness, disappearing so far into a place I will never go. 

We are a state born of myth and fantasy, molded and re-shaped, developed and re-sold as paradise. 

Fantasy Lands. Tropical beaches. Rockets to the stars. 

There are places in Florida where all the complexities of life have been landscaped, manicured and fenced out of sight. Neighborhoods designed that afford some to live in a version of the past that removes any semblance of oppression, chaos, and violence.

This has always been about how I see Florida, how I try to make sense in my own way of our complicated history and how it seeps into today. But all along the way I found it impossible to extricate myself from what seemed intriguing about this place.

This is a story about both a place and a self caught in the overwhelming sense of what was, the promises and uncertainties of what lies beyond, and not knowing quite yet how to handle what remains in between. 

To call somewhere home is to critique and to love and to be challenged. It is to be open to the full experience, not just what you want to see or what it wants you to see. I find that true of personal relationships—however difficult for me at times—but place was the path to understanding this first. 

And for that—for someone who had always felt rootless—an equally rootless, transitory state became home.