I started in the swelter downtown, finding a perch on the stairs by the college and smoking cheap Columbian cigarettes in big hot gulps. Miami in the dog days is humid like the sky is leaning in on you, and everyone is foreign to everyone else. You watch them: a group of Cuban girls wearing brightly-colored nothing, swinging their hips as they go by; a red, sun-burnt beggar, claims he’s from Alaska, waiting for his sister to wire him some funds and any little bit would help in the meantime, really; an old man in soot-dusted purple robe, his whole hair a single defiant dreadlock, shuffling around corners waving his hands to the sides in rhythm with his curses and invocations. Somehow foreign isn’t ever foreign enough: you know these people, every one. Their weirdness is mere weirdness, is familiar. Mystery is what we crave, what we go out looking for, what we spend our lives waiting for. Even when we’ve given up, the habit of it is what causes us to rise each morning.
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