Writing
The Geography of Longing
When you grow up in South Florida, distance is just something you get used to.
The land goes on forever, flat as paper. It’s no wonder flat-earthers still exist out there—when you stand in the middle of nowhere, you can watch the world stretch to the edge of your vision like the surface of some endless ocean. The entire landscape feels like it was leveled by a natural disaster ages ago, and nothing ever grew back—only parking lots, shopping plazas, gated communities, each trying to out-grandiose the last. Strip malls sprouting where forests once were. Big-box stores rising like temples to consumerism. It felt like all of South Florida had been bulldozed, paved over, and then forgotten in the sun.
My middle and high school were over thirty miles from my house. Before I could drive, my mom would drop me off at a nearby high school where a yellow school bus picked up me and a few other scattered kids, delivering us to the Tri-Rail station. That was where the real journey began. Every morning, we waited with a small crowd of other students and worn-out commuters, baking in the anemic glow of the Florida morning sun.
When the train finally pulled in with a hiss, I trudged inside, chose a window seat, and immediately put on my headphones. I’d press my head against the plastic window, shrouding my face with my long oily hair, trying to drown out the fact that I was surrounded by other students—loud, chaotic, alive in ways I wasn’t. I didn't want to talk. I wanted to be invisible. Music helped.
The soundtrack changed depending on my mood—Thursday, Dillinger Escape Plan, Tool, Cradle of Filth—but the ritual was the same: find the track that slapped just right and let it play on loop while I watched the same world slip past. The ride to the West Palm Beach stop took about forty-five minutes. Long enough for a full album and the slow transformation of landscape—from parking lots to overgrown fields, half-developed tracts of land with sun-bleached "Coming Soon" signs that had been rotting for years.
I became intimately aware of every stretch of track. I memorized the space between that one haunted-looking windowless building and the crumbling billboard that hadn’t changed in years. Divorce? DUI? You deserve compensation. It leaned slightly, like it was tired of standing up. I knew how long it would take to get from the rusting warehouse with graffiti-smeared walls to the shallow retention pond where egrets posed like frozen ghosts. There was no mystery in the landscape, just a numb predictability that matched the rhythm of my thoughts.
Each train ride felt like a suspended moment in time, a quiet interlude between lives I didn’t fully belong to - home, school, the in-between. And somehow, that liminal space began to feel more like home than either of the destinations ever did.
All in all, it took me at least an hour and a half to get to school every morning, and often longer to get home in the bottlenecked mess of rush hour traffic.
Even after I got my driver’s license, the endlessness didn’t stop. Everything in South Florida felt like it was far away. To hang out with a friend, see a movie, go to a show, or meet someone I’d flirted with online—it was always a long drive. I remember watching the same palm trees pass over and over, the monotony broken only by gas stations, shopping centers, McDonalds, and billboards. Even when I sped down the highway, it never felt like I was moving fast enough to escape the sprawl. The distance never shrank.
I think maybe that has something to do with being queer.
When you’re a teenager, everything already feels as though it stretches on forever. Time drips slowly, like sap from a pine tree’s broken limb. You’re always waiting - for your body to change, for the world to notice you, for life to begin, to find…answers. But there’s a different kind of waiting when you’re a queer teenager. A kind of yearning that burrows deep into the hollow of your chest and stays there.
It’s a kind of longing that turns into a vacuum.
And if distance is a geographical fact of life in South Florida, longing is its emotional counterpart.
Distance and longing are siblings. Born side by side. They reinforce each other. Feed each other.
I often felt an ineffable ache for something I couldn’t name—some idea of love, connection, or recognition I feared just wasn’t meant for someone like me. I knew other gay kids at school. I even saw a few couples who had found each other, orbiting like moons in the same impossible system. But for me, even when I was surrounded by people, I felt isolated. Remote. As if the thing I wanted most was always happening somewhere else—just out of reach, behind some invisible wall I didn’t know how to get around.
I think I got so used to the mechanics of distance—train rides, bus transfers, long car drives—that I didn't realize how it had seeped into my emotional DNA. I adapted so well to waiting that I started believing the waiting was the point.
And that’s the thing about queer longing—it’s not just a crush, not just a fleeting desire. It’s a practice. It’s a slow-burn that builds in the background for years. You spend your adolescence wanting, wishing, dreaming. Hiding. You become a master at secrecy. A keeper of locks. A guardian of small, silent fantasies that no one else ever sees.
You learn to want in private. To dream quietly. To hope without proof.
And even when you're surrounded by people, by movement, by noise—you still feel like you’re out there alone on the edge of some vast, flat world, waiting for someone to find you.
Throughout my life, I’ve met more queer people than I can count who know exactly what that waiting feels like. We swap stories in dorm rooms over beer and joints at all hours of the night, on long walks in a suburban neighborhood, in the corner of loud parties or quiet kitchens. And there’s this unspoken recognition when someone describes what it meant to come of age in that liminal space of longing. That slow-burning desire. That need to hide. That fear.
I've listened to many versions of the same story: the terror of parents finding out, of a friend stumbling across a secret note, a chat window left open, a poorly timed glance in gym class. The fallout that followed. The screaming. The silence. The moving out, or being thrown out. So many had to leave everything behind just to survive. To start over in some other town, some other state, some imagined place where it would finally be okay to just be yourself. To find your tribe, your chosen family.
And I’ve also heard the stories that end before they should have. Stories of kids—smart, sensitive, full of potential—who couldn’t bear the weight of that endless stretch between wanting and finding. Who stayed trapped too long in that nowhere-space and lost the fight against the hopelessness that sometimes fills it. That’s what kills so many of us. Not being queer—but being alone. Queer and invisible. Queer and convinced there’s no one else like you out there in the flat, featureless world.
I would tell any young person reading this who knows what this feeling is like that the longing never really, fully, goes away. But it can become the most magical gift. I’ve painted most of my life. I was lucky enough to attend a very special middle and high school that provided an immeasurable wealth of experience and study in art. I truly don’t know where I would be now had I not been fostered by such teachers as Connie Rudy, Jenny Gifford, Jane Grandusky, Peter Stodolak, and Glenn Barefoot. These teachers gave me room to question, criticize, conjure, grow. Their rooms were open when I needed to find somewhere to hide during lunch, away from the onslaught of kids who I feared would find me out and see me differently. They helped me acquire tools to create, and the vocabulary to speak through the things I made. They taught me how to connect meaning with material, vision with language.
Most importantly, they taught me how to use the pain.
Ms. Gifford would speak about Alberto Giacometti as if he were her patron saint, an oracle allowing her to see through the eyes of an artist making marks that no one could ever conceive of on their own. Her thin frame draped in flowy garments, long wavy grey hair dancing in the air as she performed animated gestures, describing his use of erratic, scribbling line. She would explain the energy of the pieces by twirling her finger in all directions as though she was connecting hundreds of invisible dots floating in the air. The passion she had for drawing was infectious, and it spread to me quickly.
Ms. Rudy, her office filled to the brim with self-portraits painted by her own students. Portraits she purchased for fifty dollars each, hung floor to ceiling in the cozy room. Her zebra couch and big pleather chair were always occupied with students, flipping through the various books on her shelf until inspiration hit them. Rudy’s still lives were legendary. The large platform in the middle of the studio would be carefully arranged with an overwhelming curation of objects within a theme: the shiny still life, comprised of toasters, disco balls, chrome pitchers, mannequins wrapped in foil, were illuminated with an array of different vibrant colored clip lights, making the mountain of objects vibrate with mystic energy. It was impossible to find the perfect spot to paint. Rudy taught me how to make compositions of different sections, controlling the chaotic arrangement that engulfed my vision by cropping, creating movement and balance out of disorder. That lesson would be one I would return to in virtually every facet of my life.
Mr. Stodolak taught us to view the world through a lens. He showed us how to make images magically appear on sheets of paper floating in trays of liquid. The excitement of standing in the red glow of a dark room, watching images slowly reveal themselves like apparitions, never failed to captivate me.
Ms. Grandusky, the department chair who gave me more chances than I deserved in my first year at Alexander W Dreyfoos Jr. School of the Arts. Caught smoking at school three times in one day, grades dropping in classes I didn’t care about, popping cold medicine so I could float through the school day in a hallucinogenic cloud, my flippant attitude about everything. Her stern rebukes weren’t born from anger or judgement, but concern. She reminded me why I was there, why I’d been accepted into a program nearly 70% of applicants weren’t. That I had a real chance, and I was fucking it up. She told me to open my sketchbook and look long and hard at the drawings, the writings, the plans for larger works I had scribbled on the pages. “That’s where you belong, Matt. For God sakes, don’t ruin your chances by getting yourself in trouble. You have it. But you can easily lose it, if you’re not careful. Don’t. Get your act together.”
And Mr. Barefoot, my middle school sculpture teacher and creator of the most oddly unique teapots I had ever seen. Ears and elongated noses were handles, open lips with tongues, stretched and curved, functioned the spout. Stacks of body parts and facial features that somehow became utilitarian objects. And he thought I was the weird one. Stopping by the table I worked at, flipping through my sketchbook, overhearing the bizarre conversations between myself and the one other weirdo, he always smirked. A silent acknowledgement that I was different, and that was good thing. Had it not been for Mr. Barefoot, looking into an accidental mix-up of my initial Dreyfoos rejection letter with another student, I don’t know how the trajectory of my life would have played out.
Looking back, I owe so much of my survival to the teachers who saw me when I was still too afraid to see myself. At school, I found sanctuary in charcoal, collage, photography, and painting. The teachers who encouraged me, who asked the right questions and made space for my strange intensity, didn’t just teach me how to create—they showed me that my voice mattered. That I mattered. And yet now, across the country, those very teachers—along with supportive parents, librarians, counselors—are being silenced, threatened, fired. They're being targeted for doing exactly what saved so many of us: offering queer kids a lifeline. Creating and holding space. Telling them they are not wrong. Not broken. Not alone. In a time where fear is being legislated and cruelty masked as protection, the people who once helped pull us back from the brink are being pushed out. And that’s the terrifying irony—because it’s those people who save us from being swallowed by the vastness of despair.
And we need them now more than ever.
