Featured Writer #123: Tylea Richard

Introduction

Ninth Letter is honored to feature Tylea Richard’s essay “Caribbean Gothic,” which is the Disquiet International Literary Award’s Nonfiction Prize winner for 2025.

“Caribbean Gothic” is set in the city of Miami, which, as Richard observes, “sits at the crossroads of two of the most haunted regions in the world: the American deep south and the Caribbean.” Ghosts, it seems, can immigrate too, across state and national borders, and Richard has the eyes and eerie experience to unmask them.

With empathy and a hard-earned insight that ranges across intertwined cultural and family histories, Tylea Richard introduces us to worlds both visible (which we already knew were there) and invisible (which now we too can finally see).

—Philip Graham, Editor-at-Large

Caribbean Gothic

Tylea Richard

My mother shuffled down the carpeted hallway holding her robe closed across her chest. She leaned her head into the first doorway and found the outline of two sleeping bodies breathing faintly in the dark. She peered into the second doorway and was relieved to find my sister, the ringleader and always the hardest to get to bed, asleep as well. Just as she was turning to leave, she noticed the outline of a second figure in the dark and nearly shrieked. “You’re not supposed to be here!” But I couldn’t hear anything. I had already disappeared.

My mother sprinted downstairs, slippers flopping, and grabbed the phone on the kitchen wall.

“Do you know where Tylea is?” she asked breathlessly.

“Of course I do, she’s upstairs sleeping.” My father, two hundred miles away, groaned into the receiver. Did she really think he couldn’t keep track of his own sleeping daughter? But he went to check anyway, just in case.

“In bed, safe and sound,” my father said politely, veins in his temple bulging. Long after the two had hung up, my mother stood in the darkness of her kitchen wrapping and unwrapping her fingers in the curls of the plastic telephone cord.

The next day, my mother called to ask me what I remembered from the night. I pressed the receiver into my ear so I could hear all the notes of intrigue in her voice.

I spoke softly. “I dreamt Lauren was afraid of the dark, so I sat with her until she fell asleep.”

There was a long pause before my mother spoke again. “You were here last night, Tylea. That wasn’t a dream. I saw you.”

This is how I learned I could visit people in my sleep.

Several months before I was spotted in my sister’s room, my mother moved away with my three half-siblings and their father, leaving my brother and I with our dad. We were too white to come, she said blankly, and it would be easier for them to start over as a happy Black family without all the questions about two white-passing mixed kids with blue eyes. He wanted her to focus on their new kids, she wanted him to focus on her. They left shortly after.

I found this logic reasonable. At age twelve, I was already hyper aware of race and its sticky, complicated residue on my daily life. I understood that defending a multi-racial family was an annoying and relentless project, because people interrogated me daily. I desperately wanted to be free from the constant examinations—so I didn’t begrudge my mother or anyone else for wanting the same. I also knew that my mom’s boyfriend, a bald-headed, muscled, former pro football player might find it awkward at best and potentially dangerous at worst to show up anywhere with a thin beige girl with frizzy hair and a stack of books under her arm.

It was the ‘90s, after all. A young Black boy had been shot by police in our town, L.A. was still smoldering from the Rodney King riots, and OJ was on trial for what felt like the future of Black America. There was the Cosby Show and Living Single and A Different World and white kids were called Wiggers and got jumped in the hallways of my school for using Black slang. I understood, instinctively, the importance of a nuclear Black family—even if I wasn’t allowed to be a part of it.

But what I really understood was my mother’s impulse to start over, the allure that reinvention would bring relief. We all knew something was wrong, but nobody could (or perhaps didn’t dare) articulate exactly what the problem was. I wished that I could make myself browner and more lovable or even just more helpful so that my mother would think I was worth taking with her, but I forgave her. This wasn’t the first time she’d left us behind, opting for an adventure with some new guy. I figured this is what moms did.

I just couldn’t make sense of myself without the three wild toddlers that I had bottle fed and bathed and whose diapers I had changed since they were born, my identity already so thoroughly defined by big sisterhood that I didn’t know how to be anything else. I didn’t know what to do without my mother’s moods that I read like subtitles, the swift and easy way I could divert a blowup before it started just by reading the way the hairs on my arms rose. If I wasn’t the big sister, and I wasn’t the family’s emotional pressure gauge, who was I? I was unmoored.

To keep the missing from swallowing me, I crafted an elaborate ritual each night before I fell asleep. I lay in my bed with my eyes closed and imagined the townhouse I was allowed to visit occasionally when my stepfather was out of town. I would approach the blue front door and gently press on the handle with my thumb (it was always unlocked for me) and then turn to close it behind me quietly. I walked the few steps through the entryway towards the stairway on the right and ascended the carpeted stairs, filling my nostrils with the smell of my mother’s house: incense and just-cooked food and unwashed clothes.

At the top of the stairs, I turned left, running my fingers along the white wall where another type of family might have hung photographs or artwork. Instead, there was a trail of dents and scuffs from various fists and feet and toys. I turned right into the room where Terrence and Cameron slept in the red twin beds that my brother and I had once slept in when we lived with our mother. Someone was always peeing themselves during those years and I could smell it sharply as I crossed the doorway.

Terrence slept, invariably, with his two fingers in his mouth and his pajamas tangled around him. Good night baby T, I whispered as I stood over his bed. Cameron had beads of sweat on his nose no matter the weather and his long lashes sometimes fluttered as he slept. He was the youngest and the most sensitive, so I always made sure to pull his blanket over him if it had fallen on the floor. Good night, Cammy.

My sister Lauren’s room was directly next door. It was smaller but always had toys and clothes and books scattered all over the floor, so I had to walk with care. More than once she would tuck her life size Black Barbie into her bed next to her, so it was not uncommon to find two twin faces on the pillow, or two sets of toes, or nobody at all: my sister asleep on the floor with her head in a book. I lingered in Lauren’s room longer than anywhere else, usually stopping to sit on the edge of her bed. Goodnight Lajy, I whispered, and let the quiet of the house fill my ears—a fan running, the fish tank bubbling, the TV playing softly in my mother’s room. I never dared venture down the hall to see what she was watching.

Then, all of a sudden, I would be blinking into the morning light of my room at my father’s house, alone.

Thirty years later, I live in a neighborhood full of single story, rectangular houses in coral and mint green and baby blue and papaya. A few homes have bars on the windows and most, like mine, have wrought iron gates around the front yard that feature decorative spears and spikes. Some people have boats in their driveways, some have multiple cars parked on the grass in front, almost everyone waves and says hello. There are chickens and stray dogs roaming the streets and the park is always full of the jostle of teenagers playing basketball.

This is a small, quiet square of North Miami that is on the wrong side of the highway, the side further away from the ocean and closer to Opa-Locka, which is always on the list of most dangerous neighborhoods in Miami, and towards Hialeah, the notoriously rowdy capital of the Cuban diaspora. Although we are far away from the tourists of Miami Beach and the flashy wealth of Brickell, we are perhaps even further from the crowded streets of Overtown or crumbling apartment blocks in Liberty City. But on Sundays, when the smells of Fabuloso and stewed meat drift from several directions and the music plays from competing sound systems, my neighborhood could be almost anywhere in the Caribbean.

Census data reports approximately half of Miami-Dade County’s population is foreign born. From what I can tell after two years of casual conversations with my neighbors as we pile dried palm leaves into heaps on the curb or pull garbage bins to the street, everyone on our block is either an immigrant or child of immigrants.

Most of my street is occupied by people from Haiti, which is currently under siege from armed gangs and perhaps as poor and hopeless as it’s ever been. Kidnappings and extrajudicial killings are commonplace and the infrastructure crumbles further after every natural disaster. The United Nations is organizing a Kenyan security convoy to help regain control, but the mission has been stalled for months.

The neighbors to my left and directly across the street are from the Dominican Republic, where the government recently stopped issuing visas to Haitians and is threatening to close the border between the two countries indefinitely. This is the latest in a line of policies from the (ever so slightly) more light skinned side of Hispaniola towards the other (ever so slightly) darker skinned side. About ten years ago, the Dominican government revoked the citizenship rights of children born in the Dominican Republic to undocumented Haitian immigrants. This created an entire underclass of stateless people, many of whom have never set foot in Haiti but live in constant fear of deportation. They can’t immigrate to the US because they don’t have passports from any country.

When I see the Haitian neighbors wave to the Dominican neighbors I wonder but will never be brave enough to ask how they feel living next door to someone who was almost certainly taught to see them as criminal-minded and uncivilized. Maybe we all hope these things are unlearned after some time in America; maybe we know racism is a global project and don’t want conflict on our quiet, tree-lined street.

The neighbors on the next corner are both from Cuba, where people are volunteering to fight with Russian mercenaries against Ukraine just to get a plane ticket out of the island. The issue of Cuba runs white-hot in South Florida, so it’s hard to get a balanced assessment of the situation. I was in the front seat of an Uber on the way back from a strip club one night and learned that my driver had just managed to emigrate from the island weeks before. When asked if things were really as bad as everyone was saying, he spoke softly. “It is. There isn’t enough food. There’s just not enough to eat.” That’s maybe the most nuanced conversation I’ve been able to have about Cuba since moving here.

One of the Cuban families on the corner packs their front yard with Christmas decor: five-foot-tall reindeer, Mr. and Mrs. Claus bobbing around full of blasted air, multi-colored lights wrapped around every palm tree. The house across from them is inhabited by the only people on the block that don’t respond when you greet them, they just scowl and look away. In the story about them that I have invented because they do not make conversation, they aren’t rude on purpose. They just see their little house as temporary and don’t want to get connected to this place. Although I worked my whole life to be able to buy a house in this neighborhood, I can certainly imagine how it might be for someone else another place to flee. It is very Black, and unapologetically immigrant, and although definitely not poor, certainly not moneyed. These are not things everyone wants.

My neighbors came from places where there is passionate national identity, fiercely defended local dialects, grinding poverty, and relentless violence. In other words, they probably wouldn’t have left if they hadn’t felt they needed to. If there wasn’t something breathing down their necks. I grew up in New Jersey then spent nearly two decades trying on a handful of major cities (NYC, Boston, Providence, DC, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Oakland) before submitting to Miami’s humid grip.

When people ask, I say that I came to Miami to escape the cold and that is mostly true. The other truth is that the unrelenting search for home had simply exhausted me. After moving so many times as a child and then replicating that pattern as an adult, I had shuffled apartments and cities for years. In the end, I bought my own house with my own blue door and resolved to call it home, forcing myself to feel the boredom and the safety of that permanence.

I remain unconvinced that I picked the right place in which to finally settle. Like men who date around until they suddenly wake up in their late thirties ready to be married and then propose to whichever woman is around at that precise moment, I worried I married the city I happened to be inside of when I awoke in a panic about belonging nowhere. But there is perhaps an even bigger truth about why I chose this place, or why it chose me: there is a unique melancholy to Miami that I can feel on my skin as it blows around on the muggy breeze, catching itself on my arms like Spanish moss. It is the melancholy of a people who have been driven from their homes and spend every day trying to convince themselves that this new one is just as good, maybe even better. The flight and the constant reckoning mark a bifurcation; they have been duplicated, one version here, one version forever suspended in time in whatever place they left behind. Migrant limbo. And because it is a city full of people with body doubles, Miami itself is as if suspended in amber.

It is possible here, easy even, to have a full and rich and not at all marginalized life entirely in the language or dialect of your native country, to interact primarily with people from your native country or region, eating your dishes, dancing to your music and going to your own churches, schools, clubs. Access American prosperity, resist Americanization. In a place where deep gratitude for a new life and missing your old one are not contradictory impulses, where liminality is mainstream and home is a relative term, I finally feel like I’m able to put down roots.

I wrote “locals only / no tourists” on my dating profile, but J. messaged me anyway. They had a cute smile and a clever bio, so I talked myself into making an exception this one time.

On New Year’s Day we met in a town named Plantation where J. was visiting their family for the holidays. Despite my initial resistance to driving all the way to Broward County and meeting in a place with such an unironically evocative name, I agreed because it was the start of the new year, and I was feeling more optimistic than usual.

We met in a park where tiny burrowing owls nested in holes like prairie dogs and greasy ducks swam in thick, unmoving water. J. wore a pink satin bomber jacket, white jeans, and chunky black sneakers that looked like a tripping hazard on their small frame. I was wearing a long black t-shirt dress and Bottega Venetta platforms that were equally impractical for a daytime picnic. I immediately liked that we both enjoyed being in nature but refused to dress to meet its requirements.

We sat under the shade of a big tree and shared remnants from our kitchens: half full blueberry containers, a bag of almonds, an opened pouch of dried mangoes. We snacked and talked for hours, never fully taking our eyes off the water in the way one does in South Florida—just in case some kind of reptile might decide to climb ashore and head in our direction. J. told me about growing up in Colombia and then being thrown into an American high school to learn English, coming out as gay and then as transgender in a religious family, and later becoming a writer. They were smart and chatty so the conversation flowed easily, but they were also short and skinny and earnest in a way that didn’t give me goosebumps. Definite friend vibes, I reported to the group chat later.

Once J. returned to San Francisco we kept in touch, trading book and movie recommendations and swapping playlists. Every few months they would come back to South Florida to visit family or give a talk at a nearby university, and they’d come to my house bearing snacks and we’d chat and watch TV.

On one of those trips back to Miami, we ventured to a leather bar in Wilton Manors, Fort Lauderdale’s gayborhood. I was served an incredibly strong gin and tonic and J., nearly two years sober, had a soda water. We sat on stools in the back and watched the boys frolic, pulling each other teasingly into the bathroom stalls or huddling in small groups near the bar. Maybe it was the stiff drink, or the proximity to the easy way gay men gave themselves to one another, or maybe it was a small protest against not having any lesbian bars to go to, but J. and I kissed. All of the sudden there was heat. It didn’t feel friendly at all.

What I thought would just be a hookup turned rapidly intense in the way that these things do when there are no cisgender guys involved. Just lots of queer feelings bouncing around frenetically like the birds that help Disney princesses get dressed before the ball. Something enchanted is happening and there’s really nothing you can do but let yourself be wrapped in colorful ribbon, place your foot into the glass slipper, and hold on tight.

We talked about books and music while still sticky, holding each other, in bed. They taught me how to dance cumbia (it’s all in your hips) and I taught them to twerk (focus on the muscles in the back, not the butt itself). We went on long walks with my dogs and held hands during arguments “to stay soft with each other.” They had big expressive eyes that broadcast whatever they were feeling, and in those early days I would catch them looking at me with a pained, dopey stare that made me want to protect them.

The truth was I didn’t feel ready for what was unfolding between us. I hadn’t dated seriously in the three years since my divorce, promising everyone I would never fall in love again. I had been so corporeally certain that I was going to grow old with Ale that when, the day after our wedding, she pinned me on the bed, climbed on top of me, and screamed into my face with the force of hurricane, I was more disoriented than upset. It took me a very long time to understand what was happening, to name the abuse, to admit it to anyone else, to actually be open to the possibility that our marriage would have to end if I wanted to survive, and then to decide that I did, in fact, want to survive. During those days I was a compass that spun around and around without ever finding north, and my biggest fear was that I would once again set my orientation to someone else and lose my way. I could still feel the ghost of Ale on my skin sometimes.

But J. was patient. I said I wouldn’t spend a lot of money on airplane tickets, wouldn’t talk on the phone all night, didn’t want to get carried away with everything. We talked about it, all of it, over and over again until there were no dark corners anymore. And the next thing I knew, J. was standing at the arrivals gate at San Francisco airport with a bouquet of flowers.

Although we fell for each other quickly from that point, there was none of the familiar pressure towards any finish line. J. was not interested in moving back to the place that had hosted the worst years of their young adult life, and giving up the warmth and spaciousness of my new home for fog and tech bros wearing VR glasses seemed equally preposterous to me. Although inconvenient, we figured that we could manage the long distance for a while before we needed to make any decisions.

So we scheduled Zoom dates on Wednesday evenings, where we would peruse virtual gallery exhibitions and watch documentaries on YouTube. We set up regular calls on Sundays to check in on how things were going between us, which I referred to as business meetings and made jokes about our relationship performance on the market the week prior. When I was overcome by missing them, they read me children’s books over the phone until I fell asleep.

But the missing just got harder, and I started to feel alone in an old, achy way.

“Baby, you have to stop coming here at night. I’m not sleeping at all.” J.’s voice was deep and full of gravel.

After a few months of dating, I had begun regularly visiting them in my sleep and they were exhausted.

I apologized and tried to explain, again, that I didn’t know how to control it. It was just a thing that happened when the missing got too big. By then, these night visits had become an infrequent but regular part of my life, mostly with people I was romantically involved with but also with good friends.

My ex sent me a long email after we got divorced asking me to please stop visiting them at night. It had been my choice to leave, and it wasn’t fair that I was breaking our no contact agreement in that way. Unless I actually wanted to get back together?

My best friend Yaneris sends me complaining messages via WhatsApp: You came last night, and you were talking so much, just going on and on…Can’t you just call me?

Another friend Sean claims that I often bring random people to meet him in the night. “Have you met my friend so-and-so?” I ask him. Invariably, I wake up to his messages: Stop bringing randos to my dreams, you maniac.

The people I visit never describe the encounters as dreams. There is no narrative arc, things are not playing out as if watching a movie. I’m usually just sitting there, in their rooms, sometimes talking and sometimes not. They don’t report experiencing it the way they do when they dream they’re back in high school with no pants on or their teeth are falling out. My visits feel more like interruptions than scenes unfolding, like a friend that stops by uninvited just to hang out.

There have been a few occasions where I intentionally tried to visit someone by using the same technique I did when I was young: laying very still in my bed, I imagined all the details of a person’s house, their room, their face, their hands, their smell and then I let myself fall asleep into those fragments. But mostly it seemed to happen without meaning to and mostly without my knowing. I never put any effort into understanding what was going on or what it might mean, but it had never been this disruptive, never threatened to separate me from someone I loved.

“Well, you need to talk to someone or do as some research or something. This is not sustainable. I feel like I’m being stalked.” I can tell J. is straining to keep a soft tone, but it feels like a threat. Worried J. will leave me, I busy myself with sense-making. Starting, of course, with diagnosing myself on the internet.

From Wikipedia I learn that dreams are as old as written history itself. People from ancient societies all over the world included dreams in their cosmologies, which they mainly interpreted as messages from the divine. The dreams in The Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem from what is considered one of the world’s oldest literary works, were omens and prophecies from the gods. There were twenty-one recorded dreams in the Bible. Some accounts claimed the call to prayer in Islam was the result of a dream from one of Prophet Muhammed’s companions.

The Kalina people indigenous to the northern coast of South America (and related to the Caribs of the Lesser Antilles) believed that in the ancient past they did not dream at all. The ability to dream was given to them as a gift from the ancestors in order to “infuse them with a soul.” According to this tradition, neglecting these gifts means rejecting their messages and the Ancestors themselves.

I turn to Reddit, which overflows with accounts of lucid dreaming, where people control their dreams and how they unfold. They fly over the dreamscapes and create alternate endings, but there is no mention of appearing in other people’s rooms while fast asleep across the country. This doesn’t seem to describe my situation.

I stumble upon the term “astral projection” during another web search and then go down a rabbit hole of metaphysical websites full of illustrations of bodies floating above their beds, third eyes aflame. But the descriptions of astral projection always include an out of body experience, which doesn’t feel right. Plus, the scientific literature says that astral projection is a symptom of schziophrenia or a dissociative disorder. Terrified to add another pathology to my file, I quickly abandoned it and the internet with its endless rabbit holes.

Friends try to help but I feel like they have watched too many fantasy movies. There is too much excitement in their voices, eyes go too wide. They think I am about to get shipped off to wizard school in a puff of smoke when actually the experience feels supremely mundane. Mostly I am sitting on J.’s bed in their small Mission apartment, running my fingers through their hair. The streetlights glow from behind their curtains and people shout from the corner below. It doesn’t feel like science fiction in my body.

I reluctantly turn to famous books by Freud and Jung and Harvard-trained neuroscientists, but there are no explanations, scientific or otherwise, for what is happening. Instead, I read about a condition called Fatal Familial Insomnia, a rare genetic condition where those afflicted become entirely unable to sleep for days and then weeks and then ultimately not at all. There is no sedative or sleeping pill that can override the condition and there is no cure. Once symptoms begin, patients die invariably within ten months and it is much like a descent into a mania that never ends. There are approximately 50 to 70 families worldwide that carry the mutation. I find myself able to muster some gratitude that my sleep condition, whatever it is, genetic or not, won’t actually kill me. With that reassurance, I stack the books in the corner of my living room and don’t open them again.

Nonetheless, I start to dread falling asleep, thinking of the terrified teenagers who got sucked into their mattresses and turned into human smoothies when finally succumbing to sleep in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. I scroll and do crosswords and say aloud to myself, “Stay in your own bed!” Nothing seems to work.

Miami sits at the crossroads of two of the most haunted regions in the world: the American deep south and the Caribbean. Because the city is powered by a very well-funded branding apparatus, its location on these supernatural fault lines is not immediately obvious to most Americans. I can see you right now, conjuring montages of sandy beaches with soft pink lifeguard towers, Cuban women with long, tanned legs, and nightclubs that spray ecstatic partygoers in neon light. This isn’t a lie, per se, but it is far from the whole truth. Miami is a city full of ghosts.

It shares some common historical characteristics with other places tucked below the Mason-Dixon, namely the murder of Native people, the subjugation of enslaved Africans, and the bloodlust of white settlers. In fact, Florida was purchased from Spain specifically because the United States wanted to end the safe haven that the territory provided runaway slaves. Florida only became part of America in order to ensure slavery, and by extension the American colonial project, continued uninterrupted. There were hundreds of plantations throughout Florida, including the building which later became Miami-Dade’s first ever courthouse.

Florida would also become the site of the first Indian boarding school on record. Richard Pratt, the army captain who famously said, “Kill The Indian, Save The Man,” brought 72 Native prisoners to Florida for a social experiment. He wanted to prove that removing Native people from their land and teaching them to read, write, and speak English and attend church could “civilize” them, thereby solving the Indian “problem.” After several years, the experiment was deemed a “success” and the boarding school model was exported around the country, where children were murdered, ties to families severed, and entire languages eradicated. We have Florida to thank for this innovation.

So if the residue of human suffering leached into all of America’s soil, but especially into that of the American south, then it is certainly in Miami’s dirt too. If you have ever seen a beautiful woman cry while perreando on an oblivious bro whose jaw is scissoring back and forth faster than the beat, then you will know this place is cursed. There are other signs too: the figures with bruised faces and full body compression fajas picking up their prescriptions remind us of our own fleshly decay. Buildings collapse into the sand and are quickly rebuilt with bones in the foundation, immigrants protest against immigration, male politicians in high heeled boots outlaw cross-dressing. To live here is to see annihilation everywhere and invite it over for un cortadito.

The Caribbean basin, much closer in climate and topography and culture to Miami than to that of Washington, DC or Plymouth, Massachusetts, sits on a similar silt of colonial misery: plantations and sunburned settlers and knife blades across the neck. The only real difference between Miami and any other Caribbean city is that the residents there readily admit they live among ghosts. There is no impulse to prove what is unseen, to defend “rationality.” If you encounter a lost spirit in Jamaica or Belize, a local will nod their head knowingly and offer quick instructions on how to get rid of them: throw salt or hide your thumbs, or perhaps they may pass you the number for the local Obeahwoman or a Manbo if your ghost is particularly tenacious.

While living in the Dominican Republic on a research fellowship, I made the impossibly foolish mistake of visiting the Alcázar de Colón and not crossing myself at the threshold. The imposing 16th century castle was the first such colonial palace in the “New” World, later becoming home to one of Christopher Columbus’ children. It is now a museum filled with rusty guns, body armor I cannot imagine anyone being able to tolerate in the Dominican heat, and American tourists who don’t understand that colonizer ghosts do not retire. After a year of living on the island and experiencing a series of bad luck (I had fallen in love with a DJ, the worst luck that could befall a person), my friends traced it with forensic precision to that first museum visit and my ignorance about curse protection. I was given methodical instructions on how to shake off the fukú and I followed them diligently: flip yourself backwards three times in the Caribbean ocean (not the Atlantic) while concentrating on the curse being lifted. I needed my heartbreak to lift, and I found myself healed.

Just as the residue of Columbus clung to me for months unwittingly, the ghosts of the Caribbean are ever on the move. With so many people emigrating from the Caribbean to South Florida in the last several decades (27,000 a year on average), it would be reasonable to assume that some of the duppies and jumbies and duendes must have tagged along with their immigrant hosts for the ride, too. And encountering the same heavy air and fruit trees and salty waves as back home, some must have decided to stay and mingle with the local Miami spirits. Unlike the spectral residents of abandoned plantations in Alabama or Mississippi, the ghost population of Miami grows and changes over the years—just like the city’s living population. Maybe this makes for a special dynamism to the haunted energy in South Florida and this is why my night visits increase in frequency, intensity.

But more than a tropical noir born from brutal history, Miami is a city of ghosts because it is a city full of people whose lives are defined by a deep missing for somewhere else, for somebody else. They are forever looking South, as if into the past, until there is only a phantom world that is neither here nor there, inhabited by the ghosts of who and what was left behind. Perhaps I chose to live in Miami because I am one of these ghosts, and I like the company.

I’m sleeping badly and so is J. so we’re bickering constantly. The tone of text messages are misinterpreted and replies grow curt. We go days without talking now, everyone in their own corners, stewing. I need this to stop so I start sleeping with another woman that I don’t have to miss because she lives just on the other side of I-95 in a neighborhood just like mine. She grew up in Haiti and is unmoved by my ghosts.

The nightly visits to J.’s small apartment stop quickly thereafter. Along with it, I can feel a rupture. Suddenly there are two me’s, the one who runs her dream fingers through J.’s hair, and the one who lifts Maya’s sports bra slowly over her head.

J. comes to visit in an effort to repair what has been strained by months of sleep deprivation and distance but we both feel the disconnection acutely. I don’t want to kiss or hold hands or really be touched at all and every time I move away, I can see how much it hurts them. J. asks what is wrong and the only thing I can manage to say is that I can’t live inside of the missing. I know there is a way to go backwards, to before I cut them out of me using another woman as a scalpel, but J. will only leave again and the cycle will repeat itself.

“I don’t think long distance is good for you. You need someone who isn’t always leaving,” J. says. I suggest that they consider moving to Miami to be with me, but J. dismisses this idea immediately.

“You don’t move across the country to fix things,” they say. “You move across the country because things are already good and you want to make them better.”

The next day, I watched J. pull their suitcase into the trunk of a Toyota Corolla, duck into the backseat and pull away without looking back. I knew they were crying, like I was, but not trying to find my eyes one last time felt like a cruelty. My house stood empty, their absence equal parts relief and drowning.

Weeks later, J. moved out of their small San Francisco studio into a loft in Las Vegas. Since I have never visited, don’t know the shape of the rooms or the smell of the hallways or the angle of the sun through the windows, I am unable to find them in the night. J. tells me they dream my dog comes to their bedside and begs for them to return to Miami. She misses you so much, he tells J. in a human voice, but she isn’t going to ask you herself. Please come back.

I ask J. why they didn’t listen, why they didn’t come back for me. I see them shrug in the square of my phone. “Ay niña, no sé. Not every dream means something.” But we both know that’s not true.

When I was in elementary school, my mother punched through a window in the room where my brother and I sat watching cartoons. It was a small, ground-floor room with a maroon futon couch and a thirteen-inch television with brown panelling. My father’s strategy had been to buy the smallest TV he could find with the hopes that it would discourage us from watching. Of course it had no such effect. We just sat extremely close to the screen, eating bowls of cereal and pop tarts and drinking Sunny D.

We were watching the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles while my parents argued on the front steps. I could hear that she wanted to take us but he wouldn’t let her. I focused on April O’Neil’s pale yellow jumpsuit and white boots. Minutes later, my mother walked around the house where she no longer lived, entered the backyard that was no longer hers, and put her fist through the double-paned glass as Master Splinter dispensed some sage advice. I am still not sure what she was trying to accomplish—to liberate us via the opening in the window or if this was a symbolic protest to register her disapproval or, even worse, if she had been trying to manufacture an injury to pin on my dad. But I remember she held her arm in front of her, blood rushing down her elbow and shouted at me for help.

“Please open the door, I’m hurt!” I could see through the fist-sized hole in the glass that the blood was turning her shoes red.

My father’s voice boomed like I had never heard before: “Don’t you dare open that door!”

I ran around in circles between the window and the door, not knowing who to obey. But once I heard the sirens, I grabbed my little brother and we hid in the deep hall closet upstairs. It was dark and cool and there were pillows to sit on. I told him a story from memory, not daring to pull the lightbulb’s chain to read from one of the books I had stashed away for moments like this. My brother still has no memory of this day, or the ones like it, because you could barely hear the walkie talkies over the sound of my voice.

The next time I saw my mother, her hand and wrist were bandaged tightly but she made no mention of what had happened. She was cheerful and chatty and I liked her that way, so I didn’t dare ask. I was careful to stretch those moments out as long as possible, to never be the reason they ended, because hearing her light laughter felt like I had finally come up for air after holding my breath. Of course the lightness would end, invariably, in abrupt and ear splitting ways. I was always furious at my father, my brother, the stranger at the grocery store or the bad driver on the highway for ruining things. Why weren’t they more careful?

But to punch through a window seemingly unscathed, to take up so much space, I was certain my mother was indestructible. And she agreed. She structured our family life around this central belief: she was both indomitable and omniscient. We were to ask permission to leave the room or change the channel on the TV or before opening up the refrigerator. I’m your mother, not your friend, her favorite refrain. You should be afraid of me and save your feelings for your friends. I was and I did. My father, a gentle white man that was afraid of everything (including her), seemed like a non-speaking character in the production of our lives. This didn’t seem so strange at the time because I didn’t have a speaking role either.

I bought my house from a Russian and German woman who had owned it for forty years prior. In my calculation, buying from the singular white person for miles around meant I wasn’t jumpstarting gentrification. More like passing the baton from one outsider to another. People still stop me when I’m walking my dog and ask about my “mother,” confusing that tall, broad-shouldered woman who used to breed Rottweilers in what is now my backyard with my real mom. I say she is doing quite well thank you and then wonder what they would think if they knew my mother was also tall and broad-shouldered, but with skin the color of mango wood and that she had never stepped foot inside my house. I hoped she never would.

When I hired a local contractor to fix the drywall in my house, I was unsurprised when two brothers and a son tumbled out of the pickup truck asking questions before they had even reached the front door. Caribbeans are generally pretty nosy, and everyone I’d hired to do work at my house thus far had asked some variation of the same question: Is your husband around? An electrician had told me “I knew you weren’t from here because Miami girls would never try to do what you’re doing.” He didn’t specify what exactly I was trying to do, but I understood that he meant making a life for myself without a man in sight.

But this time, the handyman asked me where I was from.

“New Jersey” I replied brusquely, knowing this was not the answer he was looking for.

“No but where are your people from?”

“Oh, I’m half Black half white,” I said, bracing for the wow, you don’t look Black part of the conversation.

“No, you’re not listening. Where are your people from?”

“Well, my grandma is Black American and my grandfather was from Trinidad.”

“I knew it!” He let out a little yelp of pleasure. “I told them you were Trini as soon as I saw you!”

It turned out that they were also from Port of Spain and claimed to have lived next door to a family with my grandfather’s last name before they moved to Miami. We joked around for the rest of the afternoon, laughter erupting easily between us. They invited me to a family function and followed up a few times over the next week to see if I was coming. But I stopped replying to the texts because being seen was so profoundly pleasurable that I was embarrassed for myself. This must be some kind of Miami scam, I decided, blocking the number.

Now that I have proof that these nighttime visits, whatever they are, make me impossible to date, I worry all the time. I worry about being crazy, about brain damage, about dying alone. I worry that my niece, who visited me in the night multiple times before she was born, will be like me. I expect that she will come looking for guidance and I will be an elder with nothing wise to impart. Everyone I ask for advice tells me that these things come from the matrilineal line and if I want real answers, they say, I will have to reconnect with my mother. Reddit cannot save me. I consider calling her, before I am reminded of the last time we saw each other.

The week after my first date with J., my mother stands in the lobby of the funeral home trying to balance herself against a table full of pink flowers. Her eyes are as puffy as the tulip bulbs and her wig has dipped too far down her forehead. Everyone else is in the main hall hugging and passing babies around and quietly complimenting how well the mortician has done, but she can’t stand to be in the same room with her own mother’s body. I know that some of her sobs and gulps for air are performance, perhaps one of the most important of her life, but there is real pain too. I quietly leave my place in the pew and go to her.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I say quietly. “I hope you are taking care of yourself.” I am not surprised to find I mean it. It has been about seven years since we’ve seen each other or spoken.

“Thank you,” she sniffles and pulls me into a hug. “It’s good to see you.”

I let myself be hugged by my mother and I remember how her laughter used to fill my lungs with fresh air. We separate and I turn to leave, I’m still careful not to ruin those fleeting moments, when she reaches out and clutches my arm with desperation. I wonder immediately if it will leave a bruise.

“Oh my God, Tylea! Is that you? I thought you were your cousin!” She is nearly shrieking.

I can tell by the wildness in her eyes that she has genuinely not recognized me, her first born. We haven’t stood face to face in several years, but I can still see all the similarities plainly. I consider the possibility that she has never actually looked at me before. I mumble something and flee quickly, back to where the rest of my family is waiting for the funeral service to start.

We sit at different tables in the repast and I avoid her in the line for food, tea, and the bathroom. I am so relieved to see that by the end of the night she is too high to start any fights, her eyes tiny and low. She leaves before sunrise, and I am relieved again.

But this encounter haunts me. I am certain my atoms have been split once again: the me that my mother sees when she thinks about me, and the me that has always been standing before her, unrecognizable.

Two years after my mother left to restart her life, it fell apart again. She broke up with her boyfriend and found herself suddenly alone in a suburb with three toddlers under the age of five. Even now, thirty years later, I must insist that she missed me and that is why she sent for me. It was not because I cooked and cleaned and tended to children without complaint. That I gave her money from my afterschool job and got straight A’s without needing so much as a glance at my homework. I moved in with her a couple weeks into my freshman year of high school because she missed me and needed me as much as I did her. This is the only ending of the story that I can allow.

“Young women belong with their mothers,” she had said on the phone, as if trying to convince me to move. As if the separation had been my choice all along. We had been apart for less than three years by then, just a blink in the canvas of a whole life. And sometimes, when there were Chinese food cartons crowding the dining room table and someone was telling a funny story and my mother’s laughter was high and bright, I could almost see that she was right. The time apart had been almost nothing at all.

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