This post was submitted by Kareem

It’s been almost two months now since I last stepped foot in the District and left to start an adventure down south. Really, really south. As far south as you can go before you hit communism, and reggae, and Carnival. After serious debating last December, I decided to put my love for my home, still fairly new at the time, of the District of Columbia on hold, and move to Tampa, Florida. It was, in every sense of the phrase, a power move. Or as my mother likes to remind me quite frequently over the phone, “Hunny, the thing young people do to get ahead and go places.” Places? Like Tampa, Florida? Why would I want to leave the one place I finally felt at home? And understood (ish)? And loved? DC! I had felt like I had just started understanding the round-abouts and copious Ethiopian eateries before I turned around, bent over, and kicked my own ass out. And out and out and out, twenty hours out in a U-Haul to be exact, to the nation’s phallic shaped, hurricane loving, blue-haired kingdom of Florida.

After the tears and the heart break, there was fear. I’d moved to new places before: everyone does. I even moved halfway across the world to Cairo, Egypt. But what separated Cairo and Tampa was, quite simply, language. While I seemed to be able to speak the language in Cairo, joke with taxi drivers in Arabic, order falafel with all the fixings like a pro, and get my way around the Giza plateau at 3 am slightly drunk (read: drunk), I found I couldn’t speak the language, my own native English language, in Tampa. I couldn’t help but be misunderstood. Upon returning my moving truck to the U-Haul center, I tried to make light conversation while the U-Haul employee swiped my credit card. “Nice weather, huh?” I asked, smiling, turning to look at the glaring sun shining in through every window in the room. “Nice?!” The bald and mustached employee cackled. “You must not be from around here, kid. This shit’s cold!” I immediately stood out. It was at this point that I shrank to the size of a mouse, scampered under a pile of cardboard boxes, and wept until my friend, claiming to be a delivery boy from Mr. Chen’s Organic, lured me out and back into Florida.

Similar scenarios seemed to play out over and over during the course of my first month here. I got my first speeding ticket, offended the internet install guy with a Hezbollah book that I was reading, and generally pissed everyone in Tampa, especially myself, off. Why is Whole Foods (or as I’ve heard it referred to here, “The Health Food Place”) so much more expensive here? Why should I have to defend my own vegetarianism and active lifestyle in the workplace? And aggressively? And then feel embarrassed about it? Why didn’t my apartment building goddamn recycle? Why can’t I find a suitable gym with younger clientele? Why have I gotten so unbearably whiney lately?

I annoyed myself into oblivion at every chance I could. I found myself even knit-picking the color of the ocean where I can swim and run shirtless. Right now.  In the winter! For some reason, it just wasn’t blue enough. Believe it or not, I was arguing with that gorgeous, mind-boggling amount of life sustaining water that for millennia has covered the earth and will continue to do so until the end of everything! I was, essentially, bickering with infinity itself. And as result I despised everything and anything. I furiously bought tickets for weekend trips, as many my salary allowed. Tampa and I weren’t off to a good start.

But, despite it all, I’m determined to make this work, even if it’s temporary. If you’re from the area and know its secrets: I’m ready to listen. Despite my belligerent, bottle-of-wine-alone-on-a-Friday-night attitude: I’m determined to like it here, damn it. And there has been progress. Just last weekend a friend took me to the Sunday market at the local Thai Buddhist temple. After admiring the beautiful architecture of the temple itself, we meandered through the crowds of locals, many of Thai, waiting in line for steaming bowls of noodle soups, curries, fried yucca and plantains, tofus and fish sauces and coconut everythings.  I put my face up to every wok I passed, inhaling deeply and letting the warm sun and palm trees take me to a country where I’ve always dreamed. Floridian magic. And I couldn’t stop grinning ear to ear.

So, Tampa, if I may, let me re-introduce myself. I’m ready to live in your city. I can’t say I’ll love every minute. And I can’t say I’ll stay, for my heart still lies in the nation’s largest federal office park way up north. But for now: let’s go to the beach.

And I promise I won’t argue with it this time.

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