Courtesy of Harmony Boyd.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Harmony Boyd, 28, a lifelong Floridian who moved to Chelsea, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, in 2022. Boyd felt Florida's political — and literal — climate became too difficult to withstand. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.
I'm from Plantation, which is a medium-sized city just outside of Fort Lauderdale. All of my family live in Florida, apart from a few people, and it's been my home for more than a quarter of a century.
During the pandemic, I moved back in with my parents and I lived there for about a year.
In 2022, I went to see my best friend, who lives in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Even on the plane ride in, I thought, "This is a place where I would enjoy living."
Basically from the moment I touched down, I wanted to move here. I had not even been thinking about moving until the plane touched down at the airport. I thought, "This looks a lot better — I should move here."
I came for a week, and I spent the whole time transferring my Starbucks job up there.
The climate — both literally and metaphorically — in Florida was turning decidedly in a direction that I felt deeply unsettled by. I do not think that there is a viable long-term future for anybody living in Florida right now.
It never feels like there's a break from the oppressive heat every single day. You just don't have those nice days where it's not too bad nearly as often as you used to. And it was tolling.
The environment in Florida is on a crash course with oblivion. The aquifers are running out. There are massive algae blooms happening along the coast every year. The waterways are choking with pollution from the Everglades agricultural areas, and the locks and dams system around the biggest freshwater lake in the southeast and are not sufficient.
If a big storm ever hits, that'll cause catastrophic destruction — in an era where large storms are more and more likely.
I think it's going to be a humanitarian disaster in about 30 years, so I don't want to be a part of that. I'd like to live somewhere else.
Especially as I'd come out as trans, I feel like I could see that there was a future of limiting the bathroom laws, and the laws that make it harder for me to get healthcare that I need.
It feels like, over time, the political and social climate of America is allowing ugly things — that were always there but not expressed — to be easier for people to express.
It feels like I see the same trucks that I used to, but now sometimes those trucks are flying Nazi and Trump flags. That makes me think, "Oh, that's that same dude with the jacked-up Palatka Lean truck, but now he's just a little more open about saying what he thinks."
Courtesy of Harmony Boyd.
Both my parents are schoolteachers, so the "Don't Say Gay" bill affected me. It made me feel like I could be the reason that my parents get fired or disciplined or lose their pensions if they talked about me in school, or if the wrong person heard it in the wrong context.
Everything was making me think I should jump out of this before it is too late for me to leave.
I liked that Chelsea is old.
The big reason I moved was because it's the oldest continually inhabited city in North America and Boston is not quite far behind. Boston is also ancient for North America, and Chelsea has a lot of character.
I rent a room and pay $1,111 a month, and that's for all the bills and the rent. It's extremely cheap for this area.
That was one of the reasons I was able to move up here so quickly. I had no savings when I moved. I came up with just the rent for the first month. Then I've been working from there and slowly, slowly building up my savings.
Courtesy of Harmony Boyd.
Chelsea has a deep history and sense of place. Everything in Florida has basically only been built since the '50s, so nothing really feels settled or old at all — it feels very recent and ephemeral, or transient.
Nothing feels like it was built with real permanence to it. It all feels cheap.
It's not the same Florida that I grew up in. It's a lot darker. And maybe it's just because when I was a kid, I didn't see it, but it doesn't feel like the same place anymore.
The things I miss in Florida are a lot of stuff that are not really there anymore. Even the Swap Shop (a flea market in Lauderhill, Florida) is kind of a ghost of its former self.
I miss the ideas of a lot of places, but I don't actually have a strong desire to return to them in their present form, because they're not as they used to be.
