In Florida, I get up every morning before the sun comes up to watch the light on water shift, the blotted gray and then the pink and orange, turned to purple, with a line of almost white below it and then a thinner band of orange-red close to the sun. The water, when the sun comes up, is mostly calm and quiet, a squawk or chirp, and, somewhere, out across the river, three small birds, in a cluster, coast a foot or two above the water’s top. As the sky lightens, a boat might come to fish, and more birds follow. Even with no boat—the mullet, my husband says, are running—a pack of pelicans, eight, nine, ten, come and swoop and dive and swoop and dive and splash and swoop and dive again. A heron, rustling in the mangroves, terns and seagulls, ospreys; we watch one grab a fish but then the wind wallops, and he fights it at first, then coasts, waiting, lets it push him the way we have to, every time, remind the children, to let a rip tide push you if it gets you, until it stops a minute and he circles free and finds his way to a palm tree branch and picks at the fish with his beak before taking off again.

In Florida, I run longer than my app tells me. Seven miles the first day, six the second; 14, the third, my favorite loop over four bridges, two in that same wind that almost felled the heron with his fish, and then a straight four mile line with water on both sides, the sound of ocean that I mostly cannot see, but river right beside me, all the small dirt-pathed beach accesses and condos, palm trees, coco plums and sea grapes, the wind sideways on my face, and sun. Another bridge at mile seven, and then another long straight stretch, big houses, the new construction all built high up to keep from flooding; one house so high and held on triangle-shaped stilts, all glass. The older houses look small and scared even if they aren’t yet small and scared. Long winding driveways, a mailbox in the shape of a dolphin, another in the shape of a flamingo that I take a picture of.

In Florida, we drive every day out to the ocean. I think I will forsake everything in life, job, friends, house, life-I’ve-spent-a-whole-life-building, to look at and then feel the ocean on my skin every day. We dive down and under, down and under. The kids take a minute, and we try not to worry. We can’t teach them not to be scared unless we come here every day, and we can’t come here every day, because we live in New York. I think again we can’t leave because they have to know how to read the sets of waves and wait; how to watch the water build and break far enough out and then settle that they can dive in without fear. They’re too old maybe now to learn, and they stand a long time scared until we go back up to shore and help them, hold their hands, talk them through the breaks and settling. And then they’re fine, remember, because they’ve come down here their whole lives—how to dive under when the wave starts to build, how to swim out past the break, how not to fight too hard when it gets hold of you, just to wait, to claw their way back up, to float with the rip then swim sideways if and when it comes.

In Florida, my mom tells us a story of a former client—she’s a retired marital and family lawyer—who stood in wait outside the place of work of his ex-wife and shot her “right between the eyes.” On the drive to my sister’s place, we pass the property where she told us last year a kid was on his four-wheeler, a big party in their back field, and the kid drove up too fast, he didn’t see, and the zip-line they’d had installed decapitated him. Her son died, my mom whispers about another woman that we meet. Her daughter killed herself, she says, about someone else we see. One of the kids whispers to me, why do so many people in Florida die? I think it might just be any place a person’s lived a long time, I say. But, really, I’m not sure. I don’t tell her all the other stories I could tell about the kids I grew up with, drownings, drugs, boats run into other boats when everybody drank too much, the suicides.

In Florida, I sleep awfully every night. I eat my weight in sour patch kids, red santas and green elves, plastic candy canes filled with M&Ms. I eat handfuls of them in bed and feel sick and my heart races and I think that I should stop why can’t I stop except I can’t. I watch three seasons of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, as my husband, sometimes one of the children, who got scared in the middle of the night—the quiet creeps me out, one of them says—sleep next to me. At three I look out the big windows toward the water. The room we sleep in has no curtains and the Christmas lights my mom had installed on the house and in the palm trees stay on all night. Between midnight and three, I sleep a sort of half- sleep in which I think the whole time and sometimes the thinking also feels like dreaming, about food supply collapse, and hurricanes, friends I haven’t seen in years, about my kids alone and stranded on the spoil islands near the inlet by my parents’ house and I can’t get to them because the boat broke down and then I start to paddle with an oar I found except I keep getting lost and wake up rattling. Before the sun comes up, I pour myself a cup of coffee and sit out on the porch, shorts and sweatshirt on and I fiddle with a bunch of sentences. I read Proust and Carol Shields, Ann Douglas, Esi Edugyan, Charlotte Wood.

In Florida, our last day, I run that same long loop. I leave before the sun comes up, and, at the top of the bridge, the light looks different than it has from my parents’ deck, a half a mile up, the channel markers, red and green, the big square white signs with orange circles, black block letters say, No Wake; in the blotted not-quite light, the water’s quiet, flat, no wind today, no boats or birds, just the first hint of light and shimmery blue grey. I want to stop to try to capture it, but know I can’t. I already miss it, knowing it’s not mine the way it used to be, there is no way to feel the way it feels up here looking down at water as the sun comes up except to be up here looking down at water as the sun comes up; who knows the next time we’ll have the time and space, the kids-off-school. I make my way along the river, and the sun glints through the mangroves where, when we were kids, we first learned the stingray shuffle, seining, and then past the place that our whole lives sold the best fruit in town and now sells junk-for-Jesus, says the sign; the old trailer park right on the river except now everything is on concrete stilts and the same three pastel colors, orange, yellow, green. I do the stretch of land next to the ocean last, more palm trees, coco plums and sea grapes, sun in my face. I sweat and think I won’t sweat like this again for months. My family meets me at the beach for one more swim, so I do twelve instead of fourteen miles and don’t mind. We dive down and under down and under as waves build and grow and break, walk along the water to the little house where we got married, dive in one more time and try hard not to think about the fact that for a long time we won’t get to dive down and under like this because we have different other lives than this.