Terminus
When everything changes, it changes everything. Riding public transportation made my life livable in Miami. Which is to say that in Miami, public transportation made me.
You know, made me who I was. But when everything changes, it changes everything.
I arrived in Miami, and the transition was a little too much for me to handle all at once. Do you know what I mean? One of the things that made Miami livable for me was to imagine myself as some sort of pioneer, living against some sort of frontier.
Of course frontiers are an insulting way of thinking of transitions. Because if you're a pioneer pushing over a frontier, then you believe there is no one on the other side of them yet, even when millions of people already live over there. This is how I thought of Miami. If there was anything interesting, I didn't know about it and therefore it might as well not exist. Everyone told me that public transportation had no passengers because it was too impractical to use. Everyone else never even mentioned public transportation. So, I spent a lot of time on US1, in my car, in the air-conditioning, going from point A to point B, and back again. In the air-conditioning, white-knuckled dodging near-accidents with the Mercedes steered by everyone and everyone else.
On my first why-not ride on public transportation, I saw that there must be a third category in Miami besides everyone and everyone else, because where are all these passengers coming from? There were so many of them! The busses and trains were full of standing-room-only crowds taking in the spectacle of themselves. And they talked to me! Everyone never talked to me in my car. So I sold my car, and I got a metro pass.
Everyone told me that Miami was a segregated city, its ethnic enclaves never touching. Everyone else said, "Yup, that's true." People on the bus asked me how to get places, and I knew.
I thought everything would change if public transportation stopped being this open secret that its millions of passengers kept from everyone and from everyone else. Maybe traffic reporters would even break their silence and mention trains and busses on the morning traffic report. Or at least people on the trains and busses would have some kind of idea that their commute was making the city. You know, making the city what it is.
People in New York knew how this worked, I believed. I was jealous of this. I kind of thought that if I could fill in the lines on the MDTA map with enough stories, a sense could grow in around them. You could hear someone mention "the 36" and have an idea, even if you never took the 36. I never took the 36. Wait: yes I did.
And, still, I couldn’t get over the fact that strangers talked to me. This, is who I am living with. Some of them smelled bad; some didn't. They were so interesting to talk to that it almost didn't matter (it did).
My little open secret was that as much as I was trying to change Miami for myself, to make it more of what it is, I was also just living in a little New York deep in my imaginary mind. In my head I was living in a city where people took the train to work and out to meet friends for dinner. All the branches of the bus system extended from Government Center, stretched out, curled around and eventually circled over each other and made a safe little nest for the sixth borough of New York that I was trying to hatch. Then, everything changed. And I moved out of the little nest I had built in my head, to Queens.
I had been trying to hatch a Miami that needed me. Guess what: it didn't. But I'm glad I thought it did. It was a beautiful egg in a beautiful nest. New York? New York is already hatched, honey. New York is a peacock. New York has a lot of beautiful feathers. New York doesn’t need me (it does). That's OK because when everything changes, it changes everything. Así como todo cambia, que yo cambie no es extraño.
Pero no cambia mi amor, por más lejos que me encuentre. Ni el recuerdo ni el dolor de mi pueblo y de mi gente. Lo que cambió ayer tendrá que cambiar mañana, así como cambio yo en estas tierras lejanas.
