When Light Became Too Much and Not Enough

When Light Became Too Much and Not Enough

The first morning I woke to Miami Beach, I stood beneath a palm tree that looked like it was sifting the breeze through clenched teeth, and I realized I'd come to the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong skin. A pale ribbon of surf kept folding itself onto the sand and vanishing, and I watched it like someone watching a language they used to speak but can't remember how to form with their mouth anymore. The ocean was practicing gentleness. I was practicing not falling apart in public. I pressed my hand to a sun-warmed railing along Lummus Park—metal so hot it almost hurt—and felt the hum of a city arriving in soft waves while my own pulse hammered too loud, too fast: cyclists coasting past in easy pairs that made me ache with how alone I was, a runner counting out breath I couldn't catch, a pair of friends laughing with coffee that steamed while I stood there dry-mouthed and shaking.

I came for water and light because that's what you're supposed to say when you run away from your life without a plan. What I found first was too much pace—everyone moving slower, truer, like hands unclenching, while mine stayed fisted around nothing. I told myself I would walk without a plan, which was a lie. The plan was: don't think about why you're here. Don't think about what you left. Don't stand still long enough for it to catch up.

The pastel facades along Ocean Drive looked like postcards that never left home—porthole windows, curved corners, neon waiting to glow later like some kind of promise I didn't believe in. I traced the shapes with my eyes and thought about the people who dreamed these lines into a coastline, how they designed a place that still knows how to be playful without apology, and I envied them so violently my chest hurt. By the time the lifeguard towers threw bright squares of shadow onto the beach, my mind had not put down its bags. It was still carrying everything, dragging it through sand that kept trying to slow me down.

Getting here felt like a small funeral. The causeway rose, the bay opened, and the mainland loosened its hold one shimmer at a time, except it didn't—I could still feel it pulling, the entire weight of what I was fleeing clinging to my spine like water I couldn't shake off. Water slipped between the man-made islands in polished sheets that looked too clean, too bright, boats etching thin calligraphy I couldn't read. The car became a room where silence meant I was alone with thoughts I'd driven four hours to outrun.

I watched the skyline behind me shrink into suggestion while sunlight buttoned the water in thousands of silver stitches, each one a tiny accusation. As the road lifted and fell, I thought of all the crossings that built this ritual long before me, and how I was the wrong kind of pilgrim—running from instead of toward, carrying trauma instead of hope. By the time my tires touched the island, I had not sworn to go gentler. I had sworn to survive the day without breaking, which felt like the only promise I could keep.

I lowered the window to let in air that smelled like salt and sunscreen and someone else's breakfast, and it all felt too vivid, too insistent, like the world demanding I participate when I barely had the energy to breathe. The gulls argued above the pier as if the day were theirs first, and I hated how easy everything looked for everyone who wasn't me.

Ocean Drive in daylight was kinder than its neon legend, which made it worse somehow. The glass blocks caught sun like cooled sugar; facades threw thin shadows that traveled like sundials, and I stood there thinking about time passing, about how I'd wasted so much of it, about how I didn't know what I was doing here except that staying where I was had started to feel like drowning. The geometry felt humane in scale, playful without being loud, and I wanted to scream at it for being beautiful when I felt so ugly inside.

I walked closer to read details I didn't care about: small reliefs in stucco, looping names, tidy fonts that seemed to smile. There was history in this district that wore its age lightly, while I wore mine like a scar that wouldn't fade. I took a photo and it looked exactly like itself, which was not true of me—I looked like someone pretending, someone whose face didn't match what was happening underneath.

Later I would return when the lights bloomed and the buildings turned into lanterns, and I would stand there crying in front of strangers who pretended not to see. For now, the morning belonged to walkers and bikes and the slow commerce of conversation I wasn't part of. Someone passed me humming an old song. The street agreed to be a stage, and I was the audience member who couldn't find their seat.

South of Fifth was where the edges were supposed to soften, but mine stayed sharp. Piers reached like open hands toward the channel, and I thought about all the hands I'd stopped reaching for, all the ways I'd learned to close myself off until opening felt impossible. Freighters slid by in deliberate majesty, stacked with colored containers like oversized building blocks, and I leaned on the rail at South Pointe watching the sea write its long sentence while I couldn't finish a single thought without it spiraling.

People paused here without being told, as if gratitude were topography, and I paused too but felt nothing except the particular loneliness of being surrounded by beauty you can't access. Grass blew in quiet waves. Dogs trotted. A child squealed when the splash pad flickered to life, and I flinched at the sound, overstimulated, raw, wishing I could be anywhere else while simultaneously knowing there was nowhere else to go.

I sat on a warm boulder and let the day pass through me like I was transparent, like I didn't exist enough to stop it. On the return walk, the sky carried a faint citrus haze over water, a fisherman nodded at me and I couldn't nod back, my body refusing basic human gestures because even those felt too heavy.

Lincoln Road was what happened when a city remembered feet, and I walked it like someone forgetting how to be human. Trees knit a canopy over a long pedestrian ribbon, and between their trunks were all the small rituals I couldn't perform: a busker with a trumpet I couldn't hear over my own thoughts, a painter working miracles I couldn't appreciate, someone feeding a sparrow one crumb at a time while I stood there starving in a different way.

I bought a book I didn't need and would never read, carrying it like proof I was still capable of wanting something, anything. There was a famous garage that refused to be only a place to leave your car, and I went up for the view and stayed because leaving required a decision I couldn't make. Below, the promenade went on with its work—coffee poured, conversations braided, time spinning—and I watched it all from a distance that felt permanent.

At a table beneath a tree, I took off my shoes and let cool stone touch the soles of my feet, and for half a second it felt like relief before the anxiety rushed back in. There was supposed to be freedom in being unmade in public without apology, but I just felt exposed, skinless, like everyone could see exactly how much I was failing at being okay.

Each lifeguard tower along the sand had its own temperament, and I had none. Their colors felt edible. Children pointed. Couples posed. Joggers passed without breaking rhythm, and I walked from one to the next as the sun shook its last glitter from the water, trying to feel something, anything, besides this hollow ache.

The wood stairs were sandy underfoot, rails warm from a day of light I couldn't fully let in. A rescue board leaned against one post like a promise, and I thought about all the ways I needed rescuing that no one could see. Even without anyone in distress, there was supposed to be comfort in the fact that watching existed here, that attention itself was part of the landscape. But I felt unwatched, unwitnessed, like I could disappear and the beach would just keep being beautiful without noticing.

It always surprised me how quickly the island could pivot from spectacle to hush, and how neither one could touch me. A few blocks from commotion, a compact garden offered abundance I couldn't accept: palms from corners of the world I'd never see, orchids floating in still air, a pond holding the sky the way I wished someone would hold me. I sat on a bench and watched a dragonfly hover like a small, determined idea, and I envied its certainty, its purpose, its ability to just be without collapsing under the weight of itself.

The garden was small enough to circle twice without hurry, but I hurried anyway, unable to slow down, unable to let anything settle. What was supposed to matter was the feeling of a city making space for rooting, for shade that wasn't a transaction, for water that mirrored back whatever you needed to see. What actually mattered was that I couldn't see anything in the reflection except someone I didn't recognize anymore.

As dusk slid in, the pastel buildings along Ocean Drive woke to their second lives and I felt like I was dying through mine. Neon found its lines, turning corners into light you could almost touch, and I walked through it untouched, unreachable, a ghost in a city that glowed. The street grew a low hum, and music migrated from doorways, and strangers swayed together while I stood apart, watching people be together in a way I'd forgotten how to do.

The air tasted like salt and citrus and possibility, and I tasted nothing, my mouth full of the particular bitterness that comes from standing in paradise and feeling like you're still in hell. Later, I stepped away to a quieter side street where palms shivered and a cat claimed a windowsill, and I thought about how even the cat belonged somewhere more than I did.

This was supposed to be a walking island if I let it be, but I couldn't let it be anything. Sidewalks carried me where I didn't want to go—deeper into myself, deeper into the mess I was trying to escape. I kept a small inventory of the day by footsteps instead of miles, each one a little prayer: make it to the cafe, make it to the bench, make it to nightfall without completely falling apart.

From a hotel window, the grid of streets read like a puzzle I couldn't solve. The city was busy without being frantic, which was a talent I'd lost somewhere along the way. At night, curtains open felt like vulnerability I couldn't afford. The ocean kept speaking in a language that was mostly sound, and I fell asleep to it mid-panic attack, exhausted, still carrying everything.

On my last morning, I carried my sandals in one hand and let the water take my ankles, and it was the first thing that felt honest in days. The shore was messy with seaweed and perfect in spite of it, and I thought: maybe that's allowed. Maybe things can be broken and still worth keeping. A pelican dropped like a stone and rose with a glint in its mouth. A runner touched the pier and turned without drama. The day began with small vows I still couldn't make.

I thought of all the ways a place can rearrange the furniture inside a person without asking permission, and how Miami Beach had tried—with color and curve, with music and shade, with shameless light and quiet insistence on play—but I was too locked to let it in. The city said: here is a promenade, a park, a tower, a causeway to bring you back when you forget how to be gentle. And I heard it. I just didn't know if gentle was something I'd ever know how to be again.

When I left, I tucked details into my pocket: the squeak of sand, the cool underbelly of palm shadow, the way neon painted skin blue at night. Back across the causeway, the mainland resumed its busy grammar, and I carried an accent of salt and something else—not healing, not yet, but the faint, stubborn possibility that one day I might stop running long enough to let the light in.