Lulu Key, Ten Thousand Islands – February 25, 2013

Civilization doesn’t fade, it doesn’t wind down, it ends in a twenty-story tower with old men staring over balconies and through glass windows reflecting the sun. It ends on a seawall of rock crowded with fishermen and a beach crowded with towels and pink skin. It ends in pavement and palm trees that stand guard like toy soldiers pressed out of a single mold.

But it ends, somehow it ends, and I slip past to a place beyond condos rising in the sky, beyond beaches covered in bright umbrellas, beyond the last mansion built on stilts.

It feels like the edge of a cliff, like I reached the end and leapt back in time, leapt beyond civilization’s grasp to a place where I can breathe again, leapt into ten thousand islands floating on sky blue water.