On our island there was no high school.
I thought about it every grocery trip
as I settled into gray fabric seats
saturated with dried ocean,
knowing one day I would be very familiar
with the hour-long drive to the mainland.

Watching the palms whip by
from the backseat window,
I imagined learning to drive across these sandswept streets
and growing into adolescence with the sprouting mangroves.

I swayed with each turn, anticipating the forks in the road,
passing rows of thatched bungalows
before there was the gulf,
green and never ending,
and I pressed my face to the glass.

We flew across the water,
skipping like a rock from island to island
as I pictured myself, older, behind the wheel
as I swam upstream against the snowbirds
while the sun scraped the horizon.

But those were dreams from
before the causeway tumbled into the ocean,
concrete crashing on white-capped waves
and settling between the seashells.

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