I guess most people think of Miami as a vintage postcard. A still, flat image of pastel-colored hotels, lush palm trees, languid bodies in straw hats, and tail-fin cars that remind us of the golden years of America (and/or Cuba), when enjoying life was less complicated. All you needed was to have money, maybe evade some taxes, and hang out with Frank Sinatra. What you see in this postcard is what I now call home. And honestly, I’d much rather not. I’d give anything not to know Miami beyond those broad strokes. I’d give anything to be in town for the weekend, pick up this postcard from a trinkety souvenir shop, write a sunny message on its back, and then mail it home—which in my fantasy is somewhere else.

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When I moved to Miami, a few years ago, I thought of myself as someone who enjoyed—and excelled at—cracking new cities. I travelled often, and often friends requested my travel tips before visiting a destination I’d been to. I forwarded them links to pin-crowded google maps of LA, Lisbon, Havana, or Belo Horizonte. In moving to Miami, I’d do that again, with the added perk of being a local. I’d be able to populate that map with my eyes shut—I thought then.

Then, I found myself in a city where being a local is quite the anti-perk. A city where twenty million people choose to vacation each year, but that to me was neither a choice nor a visit. This is a story of being a local in a place that seems meticulously crafted for tourists. This is the flipped travel essay. 

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I moved here from Brazil when my husband was relocated for work. This means I didn’t exactly choose Miami—I chose a partner who chose an employer who chose the city. I don’t like living here, but leaving would be worse. Because there’s a string of choices tied to my current address, going away would cause a sequential bursting of the pieces that hold my life together.

This was clear to me from the moment I disembarked my plane at the MIA with no return ticket. I hadn’t come here on a 36-hour trip; I’d need more than a few snapshots from the NYT Travel Section to hold on to. I’d need to poke through the surface of Miami.

When in vacation, I always had moments which felt like I’d touched a deeper layer of the city I was visiting. In Mexico City, a bartender invited my husband and I out on his day off to his local bar. In Paris, France, I found an antique store that also happened to sell eggs, and talked for forty minutes with the shopkeeper. I got to know about his and the chickens’ life in a village just outside the city, which he told me in a mixture of Ouis, poulets, and gesturing, since I don’t speak French. In Üçhisar, Turkey, I stopped to look at a house’s beautiful front porch, when the owner invited me in to see the rest, including a room full of her own paintings. In Santo Domingo, DR, I made friends with two people at a bar who then ended up taking me on a day-trip to a nearby beach, where I watched the elaborate negotiation techniques involved in buying freshly caught fish.

I could say I travel like a local, but I’m aware of how problematic that expression is. The fantasy sold to us by Airbnbs and the like—that we can stay in a residential neighborhood and buy from the corner store and have chores like watering plants during our holidays—is still tourism, and so still exploitative in many ways. A tourist is never fully immersed in a place, yet is always implicated in it.

But I do believe every city has cracks through which a curious enough traveler can peek at real life. Plus, in Miami I was officially a local. I paid rent and I got junk mail. And so I trusted my ability to find those cracks and, eventually, even slide through them to reach whatever lay beneath the pastel-colored images.

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The pastel-colored images on the postcard, by the way, aren’t exactly of Miami, but of Miami Beach—technically, a different town. Miami and Miami Beach are two distinct municipalities with different mayors, different 11th Streets, and buses of different colors. Miami Beach floats on an artificial island filled with lush foliage and Art Deco architecture. Miami Beach is also where tourists go when they say they’re going to Miami. Miami which, actually, stands on the mainland, tall and mirrored, with a long and boring skirt of one-story houses unfurling around it for miles.

The mainland is where I chose to live. So, when an old friend from Brazil came to visit, her disappointment was blatant. She stepped off the elevator on the 24th floor of a modern-ish condo and realized neither my house nor my view matched her Miami database. No beach, no Art Deco, not a single live flamingo. Her puzzled face didn’t open into a smile until the day we went to Miami Beach. As we crossed the bridge into the island, she sighed relieved, “Finally, the real Miami.”

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The real Miami was precisely what I’d been looking for, and I’d made sure to explore both ends of the bridge. In my quest, I saw street art caged inside a private property. I saw tourists leaning against leafy-print wallpaper and drinking $20 margaritas in Caribbean-themed bars that kept them at a safe distance from the actual Caribbean. I saw a business whose sign said—literally—Mexican Restaurant. I looked closer, hoping for the irony behind the generic name, but it didn’t turn out to be a record store nor a hip boutique: it really was a place selling tacos. Or maybe the irony was that they also sold mojitos.

In Miami, I had more time and more language skills than in my travels, and yet a less authentic experience.

What I found in my expeditions was a city sketched by and for visitors. Tourists could at once desire the place and shape it to fit their desires, all the while never really touching anything. I wanted to touch Miami. But every time I took a step forward, I hit a cardboard wall. Projected on that wall, I saw something worse than a flat postcard: I saw a city modeling itself after the postcard.    

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“What about Miami Beach?” asked my husband when our lease in downtown was about to end, and we were considering other areas. “No way,” I cut him off. And then, “I won’t live in the fakest place in all of fakeland.” And then, “Oh.”

I remembered my friend. What if she was right—what if the real Miami was Miami Beach? This whole place had proven to be so uncanny, it wouldn’t surprise me to find that, here, everything was upside down. Maybe fakeness and realness had swapped sides; maybe the city was truest to itself when it put on a mask for visitors.

Instead of traveling like a local, I could try to reside like a tourist.

When we moved to Miami Beach, two months later, we ordered the whole package. A condo in an Art Deco building. Pastel-colored façade. Palm trees brushing against the window. Rowdy street. Caribbean sea. Except for pink flamingos, I got everything on the vintage postcard.

Then, I treated every chance to go out or run an errand as a walking tour. I became a permanent sightseer. Every morning, I went for a walk and I saw the tourists arriving with their two-day suitcases, the tourists going away with their two-day suitcases. I saw the hotel workers catering to the tourists, and the trucks unloading bread that would be served to the tourists, and pigeons looking for breadcrumbs left behind by the tourists. Like in proper sightseeing mode, I saw plenty, touched nothing.

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Inevitably, I passed by the same people, and they ended up becoming characters in my own mental postcard.

A card: Double Screen, a guy outside a nail salon, probably his nail salon, stationed on a minuscule stool and simultaneously using two phones side by side.

Another card: Painter Without Arms, a homeless man sitting on the sidewalk, selling his art, and smoking a cigarette held between his toes.

My favorite card, though, was of the old man walking his dogs. He wasn’t really old, he just dressed like a grandpa—like he was that age he doesn’t care anymore what you think of his socks. Gray dress socks, is what he wore. With shorts and beat-up loafers. He was always talking on the phone, but never clasping it: he used the shoulder to clamp the phone to his ear. He couldn’t use his hands because they were each holding a leash. The right leash had the furry white longdog; the left leash had the despondent chihuahua—you know how chihuahuas, when they get old and fat, look like a chayote suspended on four toothpicks, their torso puffed out but their legs skinny as ever. The dogs were two charming creatures who certainly deserved priority over the phone. Yet, I bet none of them wanted to witness the death of a glass screen. I know I didn’t.

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As I passed the man every day, I wished his phone wouldn’t fall. I wondered why he didn’t get airpods. I imagined myself changing that, shaping this man’s ways to fit my wishes. I imagined myself walking into a CVS, buying some eight-dollar earplugs, then gifting him those one morning. Just like that. But then I thought of all the ways this interaction could ruin my mornings. 

Firstly, this would turn him into an ordinary person. Without the phone awkwardly clamped, he’d become just a regular man walking his dogs—gray socks still remarkable, but not enough to make him a character in my postcard. Worse, though: this interaction would turn him into a real person. By stopping a stranger on the street, I’d be touching him. And I didn’t want to deal with all the complex possibilities that can unfold when you touch someone: he could be nice, or he could be rude; or he could turn out to be rude later, too late, after I’d already gotten attached to him; or he could be clingy and then force me to be rude. Years in Miami had taught me to avoid depth.

So, I resorted to fantasy.

I retreated to the comfortable limitations of a picture I once saw, of a place long ago, some palms, maybe a flamingo. I resigned to seeing the man and the dogs as figures in that picture. I started to model myself after that figure at the back, in the straw hat.

When I moved to the Beach, I didn’t embrace Miami, but the image of it. I embraced the vintage postcard: all the things I could see but not touch. It’s a very passive way to participate in city life. Or maybe it’s a very active way to watch it—like a VR travel video, in which I feel immersed but not implicated.

Folks who see me now strolling in the yellow mornings of South Beach would never imagine that I’m not a tourist, that I didn’t come for the Instagram shot, that I didn’t even mean to be inside this postcard. But since I am inside it, I learned disengagement. Like in a good travel essay, I went to a place and learned something. Unlike a good travel essay, though, I’m not proud of what I learned, and I don’t feel a better person as I prepare to go home. The worst part being there’s no going home. This is home. This is the flipped travel essay.   

Flávia Monteiro

Flávia Monteiro is a Brazilian writer based in Miami, FL. Her favorite place in town is the airport. Her work has appeared in HAD, Hunger Mountain, Hypertext, and elsewhere. You can sometimes find her instagramming @flavia_monteiro.

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