MOAN

What is the sound of this time in history? In over half a century, it hasn’t changed.

The center was not holding. Another rejection email. The fish were dying in the bay. The cats along the boardwalk were disappearing. The lizards were getting bigger. Now they had curly tails. Another rejection letter. My colleague, the professor with the bright purple hair, the one who loved K-Pop, the one whose students lamented having to write K-pop essays, would die.

It wasn’t just Covid. In some ways, it had nothing to do with Covid. What a time it was. You would think Covid had invented Death. You would never know that pre-Covid, people died. They died all the time. Death was always around–lurking, hovering.

During Covid, flesh suddenly found bone. The quiet lurking, the quiet hovering was now a long, skin-scraping scream.

So I wrote and drank wine, did downward dogs in between teaching classes and tried to maintain my rhythm as a good human.

Though in the screaming, I questioned what that meant. I still question it.

Miami was changing. It was getting richer, more entitled. People were still interested in shitty wines, especially rich people. That center was holding.

That year–2022 began, in many ways, the same as 2025. The blood of the previous year flowing into the other. In 2021, an oceanfront condominium in one of the richest and smallest municipalities in Miami collapsed. But the shock of the event did not change the outcome. The avalanche of prayer emojis mixed with conspiracy theories surrounding why and how 98 bodies crushed into the concrete changed nothing. Neither did the unfathomability.

In 2024, we voted. We voted, and the blood began flowing out of democracy. That’s what people told themselves. Chris Hedges, author of “Empire of Illusion,” a book I haven’t read yet, disagreed. The shock of November 2024 did not change the outcome. Neither did its unfathomability. The cries of Congressmen and Congresswomen changed nothing. The 25 hour filibuster changed nothing.

As Americans, we grow up with the fantasy of the rescue–the John Wayne’s and Denzel Washington’s saving the day, the image of a Uma Thurman, buried alive, emerging out of a coffin and six feet of dirt. There is the idea that we can calamitously roar a situation into calm. March outcomes in a different direction.

But waves never repeat themselves. They march on. There is only the comfort and casualty of consequence. Only the waves know the real details of June 24, 2021, and thereafter, the waves, having collected those final gasps, those holy moans, those bone fragments mixing with the sea glass and broken shells.

So do the cats. The cats were a kind of Miami Beach mafia. They were everywhere, hundreds of them in every size and shade, and well fed as evidenced by the countless bowls of cat food that lined the boardwalk under the sea grape trees despite the “Do Not Feed the Cats” signs.

But they are gone now, replaced by the pampered, kept dogs.

The center was not holding.

On the early morning of January 1, 2022, I was in Coral Gables. I went to a Soul Cycle class in the neighborhood. That’s what good humans do. They gather in dark rooms on the first day of the year and sweat out the previous year. A ceremony of washing away. I was sweating out the rejection letters, my scarily low professor salary, the feeling that I was a sucker for choosing the profession, and fears about the future.

After class, I went to Barnes & Noble to find Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” Auntie Joan had just died, so her books were sold out. But in the same section, there was a copy of James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time.” I bought it.

That morning, I remember how the pristine Miracle Mile strip pissed me off. While Miami's middle class was hemorrhaging, miracles seemed to be flowing like water on this side of town. People levitating in yoga pants with their matching dogs.

As I waited for the wine boutique to open, I looked down at Uncle James’ face on the book cover, his haunting, knowing eyes–looking, searching. The frown between those knowing eyes, a kind of tribal scar of the time. “The Fire Next Time” was published in 1963, the year when at around 10:24 a.m. on what must have begun as a sweet Sunday morning, a dynamite bomb planted by the Ku Klux Klan, exploded in the back stairwell of the downtown Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14), injuring 20 others. Two months later, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas, while riding in a motorcade with his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas Governor John Connally, and his wife, Nelly Connally.

Shocking and unfathomable, tears flowed like rivers, but the outcome, gruesomely permanent. All American permanent.

That year, there was also The March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther, Jr., gave his “I Have A Dream” speech. Five years later, he was also shot dead as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Shocking and unfathomable, tears flowed like rivers, but the outcome, gruesomely permanent.

All American permanent.

That morning, I walked into the Coral Gables wine boutique, James Baldwin and I. The owner asked me what I was reading, and I showed him the cover. He asked me if it was “Dizzy Gillespie.” I said, “No.” Then he went on and on about Uncle James’ eyes, about how “they” probably didn’t have treatment for whatever disease caused his eyes to bulge the way they did.

“We’re seeing what he saw,” I said.

We’re seeing what he felt. There was no hiding in those eyes. His eyes were moaning.

The center is not holding.

The center is not holding.

The center is not holding.

Students are being deported. Diversity is the “F” word. Education is for suckaz. Another rejection email. Dog feces is killing the bay. The cats haven’t returned. The lizards are getting bigger, so are their curly tails. Another rejection letter. Meiomi is still a Miami wine.