Like every other big step Sarah and Josué had taken in their relationship of five years with no wedding in sight, they’d discussed their upcoming, unavoidable move (loading a rented trailer larger than their hatchback with all their possessions—three to four, or maybe five, times what they'd brought to California—then hitching it to their Mazda, then driving across the country yet again, and then some) over and over for over a year: early on weekend mornings, hungover, before their alarm went off, before Sarah rose to pee last night's rosé wine and brush the thirsty Manchego taste off her tongue and tie the curtains open and twist the blind's tilt wand to let the orange NorCal wildfire sunlight in, and they talked it over with the same frenzy one narrates what one remembers of a dream before one's brain prunes the dying neuron branch it hangs from, like they used to do all the time in college, back when they dreamt, before Josué started smoking weed (which one would expect to fertilize the ground for dreams, but it actually stifles them—it expends the capacity for dreaming while awake) every night, and before Sarah started keeping her dreams to herself; over lunch on busy weekdays, too, between falafel bites, pausing YouTube every other minute just because they felt they had to add one more consideration, get yet another word in, before even knowing what that word would be (though they were always the same words, weren't they: “solar panels,” “plant hardiness zones,” “down payments,” “too soon?”); and very late on some random evenings, as well, either way too sober or way too crossfaded, way past tired of the day and no longer careful with their words—before they even agreed to hunker down together for a few hours, seriously looking into what it would take to buy the right piece of land for building a home and a farm near Halifax, Nova Scotia, where all her high school friends were moving—one to live in an apartment, two to live in a van—far enough from her past out west and their imagined, worst-case-scenario future down south back where he grew up and all his friends had stayed (which had never been probable, but was always possible).

The afternoon when they finally sat in Josué's childhood bed in his parents’ house in Caguas (where they were staying on vacation) and emailed Tish, the friendly realtor another friendly realtor had recommended over email, to set the date for their first viewing of five acres of farmland with both river and road frontage in western Nova Scotia, an area they’d selected in strict adherence to the principles laid out on the yellowed 1973 Dover revised-and-enlarged edition of Maurice Grenville Kains’ seminal Depression-era homesteading manual Five Acres and Independence Sarah had bought that spring for $3 at a bookstore in Berkeley that looked like a Toys 'R Us and smelled like lemon-lime Lysol, was the same afternoon the first ever tropical disturbance to cross the US from top to bottom and return to the ocean then turn again towards Canada made landfall in Halifax, deluging Citadel Hill and all surrounding streets in just two hours like a child drowning a stack of pancakes in maple syrup for two minutes straight.

That same tropical disturbance had just crawled through Boston (where Sarah was born and raised till the age of 12) as a tropical depression, raising the Charles with such Jesus-raising-Lazarus ease that the students of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, huddled around the windows of whichever friend’s room they were stuck in, eating stale microwaved popcorn and stale vegan jerky while watching the bullet-thick raindrops crash into the river which was already lapping their dorms and engulfing the entire East Bay across from them, from Fenway Park to the Boston Common, reported the next week in the department newsletter that the only rivers they’d seen overflowing so quickly were the miniature rivers they turned on with a switch to watch time-lapse models of hypothetical, catastrophic, unmitigated floods in their Fluvial Dynamics and Dam Design classes—those empirical geniuses and marvel-builders of tomorrow testifying in print, with their last names and class years for all their professors to see, in their purplest, least scientific, trying-to-sound-like-my-brain-is-a-thesaurus-for-the-SAT prose that that flooding might’ve legitimately been supernatural in nature, because it didn’t seem physically possible that that duration of rainfall could’ve caused that amount of overflowing—instead, “it looked as if God themself had squeezed the riverbed itself like a saturated sponge—that is, as if the waters had welled up from the ground below to either battle or embrace or submit to their overwhelming fluvial brethren.”

That same tropical depression which had just hovered for twenty-four hours straight over the Hudson Valley (where Josué and Sarah met in college) as a tropical storm, sweeping up waves all along the riverbank which would’ve been surfable had they not been deadly, from the Staten Island port to the sleepy shore of Ferrytown, a village not a soul outside the tri-state area had even heard of until Governor Hochul had to deliver her emergency briefings from their town hall because all of Albany had been evacuated, river and ocean converging to submerge every subway station in New York City from Van Cortlandt Park-242nd Street to Brighton Beach with a sloshing undertow so ferocious it ripped off every single tile from the walls of Borough Hall station in Red Hook where Sarah and Josué had gotten off to walk a few blocks and catch a bus to ride for a few more blocks then walk another ten blocks under a frigid drizzle to reach the IKEA closest to Grand Central on that day they’d visited the city at the end of a week they’d spent obsessing over the layout and furniture needs of the apartment they’d just signed an online lease for in California and couldn’t think of anything better to do than let their home design kick kick them all the way there, to a desolate IKEA on a gray day in the greatest city in the world, as if there wasn’t anything better to do there but follow yellow arrows pasted on the linoleum floor of a maze of a store designed an ocean away, observing, browsing, pointing then going on diatribes about lamps and ottomans and bed frames they’d never buy for that price, because at that price they can’t possibly last or be good for the environment in the first place, or not “good,” but rather not bad for the environment, since by that point they’d already realized there’s no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism, but they still enjoyed wandering stores like that on rainy weekend afternoons, massive stores multiple-stories-high where not three years later first responders would find piles of tiles from the underground walls of Borough Hall station in the second floor, after draining it—piles of tiles neatly stacked on shelves, and among the bulb boxes, and under foldable baskets turned upside down by water so dirty it had turned the brown bedsheets browner.

That same tropical storm had been a Category 4 hurricane just two days before, when it battered New Orleans (which Sarah and Josué had always wanted to visit, partly because and partly in spite of the fact that her uncle lives there) on the twenty-first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, reversing the flow of the Mississippi from the debris of the long-abandoned South Pass Lighthouse it demolished within half an hour in Plaquemines Parish to the shores of the Louisiana State University Golf Course in Baton Rouge.

As a Category 1 hurricane—which it had been, give or take, from Cabo Verde (yes, in Africa) to the Florida Keys where it rose three categories overnight while entering the Gulf of Mexico—or maybe briefly as a Category 2 hurricane (these things fluctuate), it had scared Puerto Rico's governor into cancelling school and all work in public offices for a day, only to miss the main island's southern coast (all along which Josué's extended family resides and refuses to move from, despite the hurricanes, and the drought, and the earthquakes) by 100 miles, ruining no days except those of internal tourists spending their last week of summer in resorts by beaches eroded down to their cuticles, where now they couldn’t swim thanks to the higher-than-usual tide, a consequence of the hurricane’s winds whipping the Caribbean for a 300 mile radius extending from an eye they’d never seen identical to every other hurricane's eye they ever had and ever would. Because hurricanes will keep happening, more and more, and they're all essentially the same. These things happen. They kill people. They will outlive us all.