Tallahassee Eulogy

For having the only house on the street that boasted a banana tree, a gazebo, and a second floor.

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For the great oaks draped in Spanish moss like the beards of an extinct dwarven species, its rough feel that made me shudder with a kind of fascinated dread.

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For the palms dotting Miccosukee Highway on the grey drive back from Publix, water and paper goods in tow, rain-filled wind slapping at the flanks of the family van. Above us all, a hurricane warning hovered ten feet from dropping, a wet admonitory finger in the air.

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For an Indian Summer that gaped all year long like a moistened mouth, the fifty-five-degree Januaries and the paper-curling heat of July when an inflatable pool was planted in the yard to climb in and out of for relief.

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For the multi-leveled porch, the tiny anole lizards sunning on the banisters. The way that I'd go to grab them with my clumsy childish hands, and they'd free themselves, the red pouches below their jaw flaring, leaving me holding the tip of a wriggling tail.

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For the cicadas that hummed alive in the trees, enormous and invisible like ancient gods, their shell-like corpses littering the driveway in the wake of their song.

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For the short walk to my grandparents' house, the patterns in their stained-glass doors like the heads of owls looking down, my grandmother humming in the kitchen, slicing into the tender meat of a grapefruit whose sweetness my mouth watered to crush between my teeth.

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For the friend I finally made at school, breaking my years-long pact with silence in a moment of bravery, only to start over upon rolling 1300 miles north.

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For the person I would've been if I'd stayed, an unquantifiable sum like an impossible number or imagining what it's truly like to simply die.

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For the small brown stuffed bunny I carried with me everywhere and lost on the move. Though my parents doubled back to look for him, they couldn't find him in any nook or drawer. In my child's imagination, I imagined him creeping out of his hiding place when the house went silent for good, taking a tentative hop or two forward, his furry pulsing nose skimming the mute surfaces of the life I left behind. (Like in the story The Velveteen Rabbit, it was my love that made him real, but it was my loss that brought him to life, my loss that finally set him

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free.)