Jesus, I’m ranking murders now?

“At least he didn’t kill his kid”?

Miamians have a perverse, reverse pride, I get that. We think our newscast is more ‘interesting’ than other places. We’re the world’s rudest city, the worst drivers, the epicenter of Medicare fraud. When some study reported that, combining all the social indices – housing, crime, attitude, whatever – Miami is the number-one lousiest place to live in the U.S., many of us thought, “We won!”

But did I really just now think that this murder isn’t as bad as the one two days ago, because this time no machete was involved, because this time he killed the mother but spared the child?

I must leave Miami before my son is much older. But noticing how randomly delightful this place is can mess up an exit strategy. The crooked line of ibis wobbling across the sky just above traffic. Or the marlin that explodes, twisting, off in the Atlantic. The little screech owls, five inches of knock-kneed indignation, that hiss at you as you walk in the night, and the lizards that freeze and fall from the trees during a cold snap.

Even these crazy-ass people might reel you in: the person who pays a skywriter to convince rush-hour heathens that “God loves U” + smiley face, causing us all to squint and crane out our windshields, and then to swerve to miss the other bad drivers, thinking ungodly thoughts. The man walking down Flagler with his head on fire – the incendiary effect just one of our ridiculous, gaudy sunsets bouncing off the cigar smoke that swirls around his head. The mighty woman in the parking lot of a peeling strip mall who can lop the top off a coconut with one blow of her machete.

It’s hard to leave a city where the local Publix stocks Santería candles. Where the owner of a shop in Little Haiti keeps a huge glass bottle on a metal pivot where herbs that look like lawn clippings float in grain alcohol; he’ll swing it to pour you a shot just for stepping in. Where two life-size statues of rearing stallions are wedged in a tiny garden off Douglas Road. That million-dollar home with the giant manatee mailbox out front? Somebody put it there.

Don’t be captured by the charm; don’t hang around to see what’s next.

I receive little reminders to get out, but they’re so yin-yang that they could go either way. That guy on the highway who blows past the 75-mph steel herd, pops a wheelie and blasts down the road, dreads streaming behind: is he here to knock someone off St. Peter’s waiting list, or to make us all tense up and behave? It’s hard to tell. Or that guy in the pick-up who pointedly roars over the median where my son and I stand, almost hitting my head with his side mirror; but he’s chased by the Cuban fellow, mouth wide, bellowing, “Casi la mató, carajo!” in our defense.Or the time I picked Félix Morrisseau Leroy as Miami’s best poet in the alternative paper’s ‘Best of Miami’ edition and was blind-sided with hostile telephone calls – couldn’t I have called him Miami’s best Haitian poet and then picked a ‘real’ one? – but then my buddy Baker taught me the infallible way of hanging up on an asshole without it ever coming back to haunt you. In Miami, the cut and the Band-Aid aren’t separated by much.

Unless they’re a chasm apart. We stop traffic along miles of the Northbound I-95 for the two cops who were gunned down so wastefully, and post silently flashing police cars mile after empty mile. The tribute is moving. They deserved to live. But I’m too mean not to notice that we didn’t stop traffic the last time a cop gunned down some unarmed black guy and later said ‘oops.’ Prosecute the Liberty City Seven because they might eventually make a bomb? Isn’t that sort of Liberty City returning the favor? I mustn’t lose sight of that; I must get my son out.

But it’s easy to put off planned departures at dusk, in May, when the humidity isn’t yet cruel, and the tabebuia blossoms catch a breeze off the 16^th Street cemetery and waltz like little wayward ghosts. That time of day is dangerous: a mysterious shape could be dog or wolf and the wind feels almost otherworldly, like a storyteller drawing breath before she begins. In those moments, it’s hard not to see that there is something deeper here, or maybe just darker.

I think it’s something brave. Here, people without much of a buffer just get on with life. Miami is so brash that, sometimes, I forget the stories of sea-crossings and chancing everything, and of people who won’t see their families for years – maybe not ever again. People who, maybe, no one will ever watch out for again. On a sweltering afternoon when the air feels furry like something in a Petri dish, I try not to be so peeved by the sweat pooling behind my sunglasses that I forget those stories.

I’m not made of that stuff, but it’s all around: the mariachi singer in silver-studded regalia, chest no longer puffed out, guitar slung over a shoulder, trudging home in the heat. I see it in a trash-filled lot, in the circle of plastic chairs and a blown-out sofa arranged under a Poinciana tree: old heads in straw hats and a certain attention to dress. I noticed it when someone folded an old T-shirt over the face of the dead dog lying by the curb in a neighborhood where no city crew is coming to pick it up. Missing home, I’ve recognized it in the upheld tradition of a cricket match and stopped to watch. And that’s when a stranger with an island voice may fashion a rose from a palm leaf and pass it to you, saying “Smile, darling,” and walk on. He knows what it’s like.

I wake at night afraid for my son – not now, but soon. So what; who doesn’t? It seems arrogant to leave. It feels disloyal to the city, to the people here who’ve never had their fuck-you money lined up and don’t have that kind of luxury. Maybe Miami lends itself to stereotypes of cheap flash and ugly tempers but, here, resilience is everywhere, like the banyan tree that needs just a tiny break to grow in concrete. Miami is a city of sly grace. It’s a seductive tar-pit that can trap a mammoth. I must find a way to tell it goodbye.

– Zabette Gérard

Author’s Note: This piece reflects on the violence and racism and magical weirdness of Miami. They did eventually find a way to tell it goodbye, and they now live in France.

Note: A few years ago, the piece was included in a Florida Center for the Literary Arts blog about Miami (then titled “Leaving Miami, a Love Letter”).