Or: A Love Letter to You and to the Moon (Who Does Not Wish To Be Photographed at This Time)

Two weeks after our wedding day, we’re walking our neighborhood walk:into campus and along the water, looping the field a few times. We opt for the long version, the one that takes us down Park Avenue, all the way to the golf course, across the street, back down the avenue, into campus, and home.

We’ve done this walk a million times, but this time feels special, because we are wives, because the moon is full. We have a new tradition we began on the first full moon before the wedding. After the walk, after we glimpse the moon, we’ll draw a hot bath, pour cold drinks, and pull five tarot cards each from the tub. I’ll interpret your cards first; you’ll do me next.

I don’t remember my full spread from that night, but I know I pulled The Moon.

On this walk, we first spot the moon over Lake Virginia, hanging low, just above the treeline on the other side of the lake, framed by two oaks on our side. Spanish moss sways in the breeze. It would look a little haunted if it wasn’t so fucking beautiful. The moon’s gold against the deep blue of the sky, of the lake, it’s something we immediately want to photograph. Even though we both know the moon doesn’t like to be photographed —especially not when so full. How many terrible moon pictures do we see plastered on social media after a special lunar event? We make fun of those pictures, and yet here we are, trying to take our own.

Admitting defeat, I slip my phone in my pocket. I hold up my hands and hook my thumbs and pointers into L shapes. I mime taking a photo with an invisible point-and-shoot camera, clicking a finger down, making a shutter sound with my mouth. This, and not the shitty iPhone pic, is why I can still close my eyes and remember exactly what the full moon looked like that night, peeking between trees draped with Spanish moss.

I captured the moon with my hands.

I’d never seen Spanish moss before I met you.

For months, you’ve told me I need to get my Florida driver’s license. We thought, briefly, that I might need to before the wedding, that Florida marriage license rules might require it. But then we remembered that, no, of course not, people who don’t live in this state get married here all the time, because people like to get married on beaches and at or in proximity to Disney. Strange, I think, to get married in a place that isn’t where you fell in love. Or maybe for some of those out of towners, they did fall in love here, at or in proximity to Disney.

I’ve already developed a Floridian’s side-eye for tourists, invasive species.

I’ll admit it would have been a nice gesture before the wedding, during which I read vows about how marrying you is like marrying Florida. Why, then, could I not bring myself to make my love of Florida official with a license?

I’ve never been afraid of commitment with you. But here I am, afraid of commitment with Florida.

Two weeks after our wedding day, as we walk down Park Avenue, I miss the possibility of running into some of my closest friends, into my sister, into familiar faces who live far away and who have returned to their own homes. So many of our loved ones traveled from all over to be with us, here. I loved that possibility of running into one of our guests while we walked the paths we walk so often, like suddenly our life had been shrunk down to fit a sitcom set.

I spent an inordinate amount of time on the Things To Do, See, and Eat section of our wedding website, because I didn’t want our guests to come to central Florida and only go to the parks or to restaurants recommended by lists rather than locals. I didn’t want them to then determine this place has nothing to offer other than shopping and theme parks and flatbreads. It worked. People were charmed by this place, friends already eager to visit again. But of course, they still had to go home.

I’m still learning how to fit the word home in my mouth.

Two weeks after our wedding day, I can taste it in the air. I can feel something that feels like a beginning.

How does being a newlywed feel? Does it feel different? people ask, in the beginning.

I finally know which lizards are native and which are invasive, I want to answer.

I love this walk. I love these paths. Our love story has taken place in so many cities, the early parts scattered across hotels, homes that weren’t ours, bookstores, restaurants, all over the country, from coast to coast. But the heatmap of our relationship would burn especially bright right here, in the heart of Winter Park, where we had so many firsts, where we still do. It’s all here, right here, even the things that aren’t technically, literally here somehow are. Is that how home feels?

Okay, I’m doing it, I’m getting my Florida driver’s license. It’s many moons later, and I have impulsively made an appointment at the DMV and, well, it’s because I also need to get a new passport issued, and in order to do so in Florida I’ll also have to have a Florida ID. Bureaucracy and logistics are forcing me to commit. Hey, people do that in marriages, too. But we both know it isn’t just that. This was always going to happen. I just needed a nudge.

Anxious in all my attachments but avoidant when it comes to the concept of home.

And if you’re the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles, please don’t read this. Because I know by law I was supposed to have done this three months into living in Florida. It has been over three years.

Four years.

Has it really been four years?

Four years this August.

First, the Airbnb in Orlando. Then, the high-in-the-sky condo in Miami that I miss more than you but agree never really felt like a home, more like a place we were visiting, like those scattered hotel rooms from our beginning. Then, the little two-story duplex in Winter Park where we live now, with the dog, the cat. There’s a whole world of a backyard alive with snakes, lizards, raccoons, a very slow possum, rats, two pairs of mated cardinals we call the polycule, more species of birds than I’d ever known.

Four years in one state. The last time I did that was in Michigan, in college. Since then, it’s always been stints. Little stints in this city then that city, never more than a couple years at a time.

The driver’s license I’m exchanging for my Florida one is a Virginia one. How can that be, you’ve often asked me. I haven’t lived in Virginia long-term in years, just ask my mother. But I’ve never owned a car, and that makes it easy to skirt by certain road rules. I’m an expert in voter registration laws, because that I’ve changed from city to city, but never the license. Even when I lost it in NYC — or, more accurately, when it was a casualty of the purse stolen from me at lesbian night at The Woods in Brooklyn (dyke on dyke crime!) —I reordered a new Virginia one.

Why keep Virginia so close? Especially when I don’t consider it home. For a four-month period between leaving New York and moving with you to Las Vegas, I lived in what was technically my childhood home, alone. It didn’t feel like a homecoming though. I could have been in any place. In my diary, over and over those four months, I kept writing I felt like a ghost haunting my past self.

Replacing my license in any of the other cities I lived since college didn’t feel right either, not in Los Angeles, not in Chicago, not in New York. Because for so long, I didn’t consider any one city home. There are some underlying Diaspora Feelings™ there, but I haven’t had a chance to unpack all that quite yet.

Packing’s what I’m better at —packing and moving, moving, moving. Even now, with you, I’ve yet to live at the same street address for more than two years in my adult life. I don’t know what it’s like to be still.

Except when standing with you, looking at the moon.

When I told my parents I was seeing someone who lives in Florida, my mother said, you’ll never move there, right? In truth, I thought I wouldn’t. I didn’t yet know you and Florida were a package deal.

Before I met you, I’d never even set foot in the state. The first place you brought me? A beach known for shark-infested waters. Or, that’s how I saw it then, when I looked it up. Now it’s one of my favorite places on the planet. I spent my 32nd birthday there, lured my friends back down only a few months after the wedding.

The first time my parents visited us here, I was wild with anxiety, desperate to prove to them something about this place. You were relaxed. You’re used to people having their own ideas about what this place is and is not. I haven’t built up that callous yet.

I’ve never cared about the state in which I live this much before. I’ve never gone to bat for a city. My defensiveness can’t just be because of Florida’s, of Orlando’s reputation to outsiders. It’s more. It’s because for the first time ever, I am beginning to understand what it means to call a place home.

My DMV appointment is downtown. I opt to drive the slightly longer route so I can avoid I-4. Who am I kidding? A healthy fear of I-4? I’m clearly a local.

The night before I get my new license, the moon hangs low and large, a thick wedge glowing deep orange. “It’s like a melon slice,” you say. I was going to say it looked like an orange slice. A Florida orange. Damn, you’ve really got me Florida-pilled.

I know I’ve borrowed lyrics to a breakup song for the title of this essay. I hope you don’t think it’s bad luck. But the truth is, sometimes I find breakup songs more romantic than love songs. To us, the full moon, supposedly an omen, never spells doom. There’s an ache to true love, I think. And nothing aches better than a breakup song.

Plus, how many times did we listen to “Driver’s License” when driving over the bridge into Miami Beach and then again on the bridge back home, sun-drunk and bone-tired? I listen to it again, on repeat, driving to my DMV appointment, remembering those beach day drives, the time we saw a lemon shark swimming slowly close to shore and I wasn’t afraid, only enamored.

Plus, you’re so much older than me ;)

Here I am, living in Florida, with the proper documentation to prove it. I’ll be the first to admit I thought this was a temporary place, not one to sink roots into. But that was before I saw the towering oak trees here with their own ancient roots systems, before I saw the full moon reflected back in a dark Florida lake.

I couldn’t have pictured living here, and then even once I did, I never imagined I’d write a Florida novel, but goddamnit, you’ve really got me Florida-pilled. You’re particular about who writes about Florida, but you’re the one who said “I think this is your novel” after I read a short piece at an event, my first story explicitly set here. I’d been sensing it, too, but I was already feeling like an imposter, like an invasive species. You would probably tell me I don’t need your permission, but I do. I want you to light the path, you and the moon.

Writing about this place, now that’s a different kind of love. You’re the great place writer. I’ve always avoided the matter of place the way some writers avoid writing the body. I didn’t want specificity, because specificity meant commitment, meant roots. How can I write place when I never think of a place as home?

“Now we’re really married,” you say when I return home with my freshly printed Florida driver’s license. You’re joking, but you’re also not.

Home. I do like how it feels in my mouth. For the first time in a long time, I live in a place where I can look up at night and see a full sky of stars.

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feature image photo by A Different View via Getty Images