Inklings 2020

idea where I might sleep the next day. Traveling back and forth between different hotels with my life in a single suitcase has left me without refuge, without security. Home has always been my only constant. I had held an invulnerable conviction that home is untouchable, which has made it hard to find a way forward. Before the hurricane, my idea of a challenge centered around entering my first national debate tournament, riding a 300-foot-tall rollercoaster, or reading an entire Steven King novel. The first night after Irma’s mandatory evacuation, my mother, my father, my two sisters, my two dogs, my cat, and I slept outside in a hot car. The next day, we spent wading through knee deep water to pick up palm fronds and pieces of our wooden fence that the wind had thrown. We were lucky because a friend lent us her rental. Other people were not so lucky. Living with a family of five plus pets in a small efficiency apartment meant I couldn’t move an inch without knocking into my sister’s art project or being woken up by my dog’s drool dripping onto my neck. Despite everything, I think back to when I laughed at my sixty-pound dogs trying to stand straight against Irma’s wind or my sister’s horrible screeching she called singing during the two-hour drive home. Hurricane Irma took me by storm, but it taught me something I hadn't yet understood – home is not a place but a feeling. While the hurricane shocked me more than any Robert De Niro film, it did not make me hopeless. Irma struck a spark in me to rebuild what had been destroyed. While my peers posted pictures of their trips to Spain or Tokyo, I took videos of the construction happening in my house to remind myself of the drywall I broke, the walls I painted, and the furniture that I carried. Helping to fix my home wasn’t a heroic deed; I saw it as just another inevitable aspect of my life that I decided to embrace rather than run away from. Today, I see the house I knew reappearing little by little. I hear the music of Notorious B.I.G. and Hozier leaking under doors instead of water. I smell pollo empanizado and arroz con leche rather than mold. More importantly, I know my spirit cannot be submerged. 14