Heeey, Neighbor: A Night in Sunny Isles Beach

I went to the Publix tonight and ran into the Savannah James. No security, no entourage — just a woman moving through the produce aisle like the rest of us, choosing her evening with her own two hands. I did the polite thing and kept my composure, which is to say I did not make a scene, though the scene was certainly making itself in my head.

Now, I already knew that Sunny Isles Beach sits among the wealthiest zip codes in the country — a slender ribbon of Collins Avenue where the towers stand shoulder to shoulder like a receiving line, each one keeping the ocean to itself. What I had not fully registered, until tonight, is that the James family are, quite literally, my neighbors. I googled to be sure. Sure enough: across the boulevard, at the Mansions at Acqualina, they keep a residence I don't even need to zoom in to see.

There is a particular tea to this stretch of coast. The money here does not shout; it hums. It arrives by valet and departs by tinted glass. It takes its evening swim on a rooftop that hovers over the skyline, a cold drink sweating on the rail, the city arranged below like a set. It is the kind of wealth that has learned to be quiet — which, if you have any home training, you understand is the loudest wealth of all.

I am not saying I've made it. I know better than to confuse a good address for an arrival. But there is something to be said for standing at your own window at night, watching the tower across the street glow floor by floor, and understanding that the distance between you and the people inside it is one boulevard wide. Proximity is not the same as parity — and still, proximity teaches you what is possible. It rearranges what you allow yourself to want.

So consider this a dispatch from the seventeenth floor: the ocean was calm, the produce was fresh, the neighbors were gracious, and the view was — as the young people say — a whole mood. I might not have made it yet. But I am, at the very least, in the place to make it. Heeey, neighbor. Lol.