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In 2015, Keep St. Pete Lit held its first Fantastic Ekphrastic. This was my piece, which was, of course, about Florida.

Hello, Florida. 

At first I thought you were a child, but when I look at the curve of your stomach I see it trace into your breast, which is no grande dame but pleasant enough in its own right, and I realize you are no child, Florida. Your heavy titian fruit, your lush green branches, your waxy veneer over everything…

What else could I have thought you would be? You may appear childlike but you, madam, are no child.

You look so young, so ingenue, but you deceive us with your youthful appearances. On the surface, you are wax and sheen, and you flash at us viridian and coral and these colors blind us to your searing whites and subaqueous blacks and most of all your grays, your nuances and shadows and questions and suggestions.

So when I look harder — which no one ever seems to do, which is the real shame — I see the cracks in the wax, the chips in the wood, that allow those grays and whites and blacks to wash over the color and claim the canvas once more. Those vestiges of old Florida overtake the cacophonous, shrill assertions of the new Florida, the Florida of the internet, the Thrillist and Buzzfeed and Slate.

The grain of the Hasselblad reverse-covers the wax and it peels away, revealing an earnest and wild land that does not yearn for color, and yet somehow color seems to find it and seek its grayest corners, corners that were fine on their own, thank you very much, and best left in memory, where they could live out their futures without interference. But we cannot leave our memories in black and white and grays, choosing to see them through a sepia Instagram filter that may make the past prettier for those who weren’t there but ruining them for those of you who were.

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Learn more about Keep St. Pete Lit, Fantastic Ekphrastic, and their events

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And you were there, Florida, in that instant of stretching and reaching and picking and plucking and living and dying, you were there, and it was full color in reality but the memory never should be.

That’s why the veneer will work away, even by the artist’s own hand, and reveal not the “real” Florida of newspapermen who want desperately to be a part of your history, but the Florida lived by those who give no thought to capturing the moment but instead devote their lives to becoming the moment, that moment of joy and oranges and backyard ballets on a cheap kitchen chair, those moments when those who are in the moment and not recording it are living and breathing and stretching and keening and giving no thought to those who are watching and clicking and writing and painting, because the real Florida knows that the ones who matters are the ones in the moment and not those passing through it.

And so, hello, Florida, my much-aligned, much-beloved Sunshine State. We are both in and of the moment and it shall not leave us.

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Read more of my older writings.