Orange Land, Florida

by Nanika Easy (Canada)

I didn't expect to find USA

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August 12, 2018, our departure. We left Toronto at the peak of dawn, cramped up in a vehicle so suffocating you can feel everyone's breath on your neck. "Suffering compensates for better days" I reminded myself. We prepared ourselves for two days of congested travel. Depressing to think that we still don't have enough for a rental to this day. The route became a blur of passing out and fighting to feel movement in my legs again. The sight of my windows went from foggy to sunshine breeze. The silhouettes of palm trees and alligators in swamps accentuated on the third day. The world all of a sudden shifted and filled the air of an omnipotent presence of mother nature. It was either that or the wind blowing from the bowels of my family's last meal of American Dreams. However, the sight of flashing lights illuminated a resort so dull looking the thunder made it look more vivid, The next morning I took a bike a resident left at our hotel room, I stepped outside in that exquisite cool breeze on the beach, staring at a sunrise pallet, venturing past people jogging. It felt liberating to ride in an environment where commercial urbanization and street noise was once where colonization of Indigenous land took place, as this was the conniving magic behind the American Dream. It can be what you want it to be without no one impeding your safe space, except the law, being Indigenous or being of Indigenous descent of course. I rode incessantly until I found a spot near the rocks . I took out my sketchbook and began letting the landscape speak to me. Sketching is the only time in my life where intergenerational trauma, suffering and isolation numb, through a gesture of my wrist the feelings wash away. The sand in between my toes, the tiny legs of hermit crabs crawling on my arms could not express the intimate touch of its natural landscape, and then went home. On that day at the beach, I didn't expect to find myself feeling ever more lonely around my family. I could not stop the feeling of pressure to be obligated to be happy, all of that hard work, contribution, care and effort that is set as a dead expectation from others and myself, something is missing. I picture myself on that beach sketching, secure in that spot for an eternity. Something snaps in me as I meditated one day, "what if I explore new communities or new people to reveal a new page to my story?" Since that day, I have been searching for an opportunity to explore the world. As my true self turns by each page of the story, new adventures reveal itself. My story has not ended yet.