In the belly of Sunset

There is a place in Miami that is a heart of burgeoning intimacy. It is a dark and quiet place, so unlike any other in Miami, and maybe that’s why we turned to it in moments of uncertainty and newness and anxiety and crushed hearts and sticky words when emotions beget silence beget hands touching beget your heart punching its way through your chest.

Sunset Place stands proudly in the triangle between US 1, Red Road, and Sunset Dr, three arteries of the city that carry the swell of its people in every direction. Sunset Place is a vision, an example of successful urban design that blends well with the growth of the city’s resilient nature while welcoming business developers and consumers eager to gather inside while outside.

Sunset Place is a few blocks down from Sunset Elementary School, the school I attended starting in the winter of 3rd grade. Sunset Elementary School is where I learned I was afraid of people, and I didn’t like my classmates. I was then incredibly impressed by the students of G.W. Carver Middle School who would stroll to the gates to pick up their younger siblings in the afternoons. The Carvers kids were discernible by their height and by their polos. Every school in Miami has uniforms (if private) or dress codes (if public) and the Carver kids’ dress code included the widest array of possibilities: white, red, yellow, and blue (navy and light blue!) polos, khaki or navy blue bottoms, jeans exceptionally on the last Friday of every month. Carver kids in light blue polos with an emblazoned hornet would stand and wait and capture my admiration every day. On Fridays, parents and children would flutter to the Whip n’ Dip a block down from the school. It was the swimming hole of our time, the Taj Mahal of all culinary institutions. In the decrepit powder blue strip mall peppered with the light mossiness that coats any man-made structure south of Tallahassee, Whip n’ Dip promised a better tomorrow. That would never fade and in high school we just moved one door down to the family-owned smoothie place, Sun Juice, that would be the seat of several break-ups, first dates, assassinations-by-water, and reunions. Whip n’ Dip ice cream is good, decent, and well-deserving of its 4.7/5 stars on Google. But more than the delicious and chaotic blend of mint chocolate chip, cookie dough, rainbow sprinkles, and gummy bears that we extracted from its freezing interior, Whip n’ Dip stood as a precursor to the rest of our lives. It was a place that formed us, that temporarily suspended whatever kept us at bay from each other, from ourselves.

The thing to understand about Miami is that Miami is a place of otherness, built by a history of constant influx and outflux. Like the ocean at our shores, most people of Miami come from the Atlantic, find brief shelter on the land, and build themselves up to eventually move on: move out of the city, move out of state, move back home. The only people indigenous to the land have been pushed out and the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes now count approximately 3,000 people, relegated to the Everglades and to the “History and Culture” tab of visitflorida.com. At school, language curriculum and origin country often segregated us. The French kids stuck together, the Spanish kids stuck together, German kids stuck together, Cuban kids stuck together, and Magnet kids did too. There was no animosity between groups, at least not of nationalist sentiment, though the occasional joke was thrown around as per elementary decree.

But for a brief quarter of an hour, or however long it took us to eat our ice cream, this organizing principle dissolved and we all stood side by side, a tiny, sweating cluster of children in matching red polos and khaki shorts, backpacks the size of our torsos and legs speckled with mosquito bites or scabs. Gathered in mutual communion of our Friday ice cream treat, we stood, together, content and at ease. A few blocks down, straight down Sunset Dr, stood the promise of our tomorrow. Carver kids would sometimes accompany us, their younger siblings, to Whip n’ Dip and would continue down towards Sunset Place, where the food was more plentiful, the Barnes n’ Noble was two (two!) stories, the shops were full of vogue clothing they could wear to their parties, and the AMC theater echoed with everything and everywhere that wasn’t here. How I longed to go to Sunset Place, on my own, with my friends, once I had them. I imagined that with access to Sunset Place, I would unlock a secret part of myself that would allow people to like me. Maybe with a pair of shorts from Forever 21, or a pair of teel sandals from Pac Sun, or even, if I could convince my mom to spend the money, a pair of fitted Hollister jeans I could wear to the parties I was not yet invited to. But maybe, and this, reader, was the thesis of all my dreams, I would be asked out to see a movie at the AMC theaters.

You see, what I most wanted in the whole world at 9 years old, what I projected for myself as I stood, sweating and grinding down on frozen gummy bears with my classmates who would go back to ignoring me two days later, was to sit side by side with a crush, any crush, in the AMC movie theater at Sunset Place. I had heard of people going there together, had seen it with my own eyes: groups of teenagers in line to buy tickets, young boys and girls going into the dark rooms that swelled with potential and promise, and coming out two hours later, hand in hand. I wanted that, I wanted to stand in line with friends and laugh and wear jean shorts and high top white Converse, wanted my hair to stay flat down my back, wanted someone to jump over my lap and share my popcorn, wanted someone to put their hand out tentatively for mine, wanted someone to look over at me when I placed mine in theirs, and lean over when I looked back at them. I wanted to be the center of attention on Monday when, seeing my crush and me in each other’s arms, the whole school would be abuzz with the news. But most of all I wanted, for that moment in the deep cocoon of dark so dark and noise so loud that to close your eyes is to be completely alone in the universe, was to open my eyes and to look over at a person looking at me, to be in the center of the world, of someone’s world. I wanted to be loved.

The first time a boy ever told me he loved me was maybe 40 feet from the AMC theater at Sunset Place. In traffic on US 1, driving down to Kendall to see his grandparents, the first boy who ever loved me told me he loved me. With the red light reflecting on his face as a movie screen would, he looked over at me and smiled, and said “I love you”. He was not the first boy to tell me he loved me. Steven Alvarez in the 8th grade told me he loved me once outside of my science classroom after he tried making out with me. I had wiped my face and rushed inside to my seat, embarrassed to have been the subject of such affection. But this boy, this boy who at 17 was so much more than I thought I deserved, this boy who would cry in my lap when I thought I was going to break up with him on Valentine’s Day, this boy who would be the first boy I ever slept with but not the one I would lose my virginity to despite our rigorous planning, this boy for whom I would sneak out of my house on weekdays, with whom I would jump the fence and dive off the high dive at the University of Miami pool after hours, this boy who held my hand while outrunning the cops when they installed motion detectors around the pool, this boy who would call me slut, tell me I disgusted him after a night when another thought me being drunk was invitation enough and didn’t think twice about my protests, this boy who, when comatose after a motorcycle accident on New Years, reconfigured what I thought gravity was because, for those 6 days, the only thing that kept me moving was the thought of him waking up, this boy was the first one who meant in.

The boy and I would go to the movies together often. Our first date was to a movie, at the fancy theater in Coconut Grove, but we would go to the AMC theater at Sunset Place often. When we did I would imagine the younger me standing behind me, watching me and my ironed hair, in my shorts I had bought myself, my body between this boy and our friends, and I liked to pinch myself in those moments. Is this growing up? I wondered, living the dream you imagined for yourself a few years later? Or maybe growing up is holding side by side the dream of your youth and the reality and realizing the gaps your 9-year-old mind couldn’t anticipate or fathom. Because in reality, I was more scared of the boy than not. In reality, I felt marginalized in the friend group. In reality, jean shorts are extremely fucking uncomfortable. What I held onto was the dream to be loved, the feeling I could imagine when in the movie theater. Maybe growing up is managing your standards and expectations so that you never truly let go of the fantasy, it just changes locale.

Two years later and 3,000 miles away from the AMC theater at Sunset Place, I felt for the first time what I had been hoping for. In the dainty town of Walla Walla, WA, a boy asked me out to get coffee and we sat for a few hours in a coffee shop outside of campus. The defining feature of freshman year of college is an overzealous drive to get to know everyone and for everyone to get to know you. It can be so disorienting at the beginning that everyone begins to blend into an indistinguishable mesh of friendly faces, all from the pretty neighborhoods of Seattle or Portland. Which is why, when someone approaches with particular interest and attention specifically focused on you, it can feel exhilarating. I can’t remember what we talked about, or how long we sat there, but the conversation flew in such a way that I would spend the months following reliving it in my head. When the sun started to go down he looked up and asked “Should we go watch the sunset from the wheat fields?” We got in his car and drove down to Lower Waitsburg Road, where the acreage of Walla Walla farmland engulfs the whole world in a space so wide that for a moment, if you close your eyes, you are completely alone in the universe. When I opened my eyes, I could see the boy looking at me, his face lit with the liquid gold light of the sunset cocooning our tiny world of two.