Right When I Needed It

Oh, Key West, you found me just in time.

It is snowing back home in Seattle, and here you have me sitting in a long, loose, terribly vivid skirt and tiny shirt, under the royal palms and papyrus, caressed by a hundred felines, teased by mosquitoes and tiny lizards, entranced by brown pelicans, vultures and ospreys and wild chicken families. I have made and eaten wonderful food. I am in love with your piece of the endless Atlantic. Your residents warn me of their strangeness and their eccentricities, but they breathe calm and lovely to me.

Thank you for embracing me when you ignore so many others. Thank you for giving me what I did not know I needed. Thank you for your joy and your passion, freckled as they are by humanity.

Behold my newness, scrubbed clean of my grey skin, my eyes unpeeling and a breath of future wisdom at my neck.

I will do right by this opportunity.