The first time the ground gave out in front of me, it was in front of the bodega where I bought my plantain chips. The earth just… sagged, like it was tired of pretending to be solid. I stood at the edge, peering into a dark mouth with no apparent bottom, and thought: yeah, same.
I lived in the building across the street, and glanced up at my neighbor, Maria, when she screamed out her window, yelling that it was dangerous. Dangerous? Everything’s dangerous. Waking up with the wrong name in my mouth is dangerous. Saying “I’m too tired to go to work today” is dangerous. Loving anyone out loud is dangerous. But a hole in the ground? That just felt honest.
By the next day, three more appeared on my block. People called the city. The city sent men in orange vests to measure, mark, tape off. They muttered about infrastructure, erosion, and old pipes collapsing as they worked. The city promised to fill them in, but you know how government promises go.
Quickly, more holes came. My block looked like Swiss cheese. Maria called them curses. The pastor down the street called them warnings.
Me? I called them invitations.
I’d always lived at the edge of things anyway. The edge of social groups. The edge of sanity. The edge of desire. I never got to stand on the flat middle of the world, the part everyone else seemed so confident standing on. I knew only the edges, those slippery borders where ground turned liquid, names turned to static, and love came jagged and untranslatable.
The holes began to move. Not literally, but close enough. I’d go to bed with the kitchen floor solid, wake up with a crater beneath the stove. People panicked, sold their houses, fled the city. But I stayed. Where else was I supposed to go? I don’t belong in suburbs with neat lawns. I don’t belong in condos with gyms and grills and gardens on the roof. The sinkholes felt like the first place that ever wanted me, if places had desires.
At night, I sat by the largest one, feet dangling into nothing. I talked to it the way you talk to a friend who knows all your secrets but never judges. I told it about the meds that never balanced me right. I told it about my uncle who had seemingly been radicalized by a “news” station. I mentioned how I can’t look in the mirror without bargaining: one day, just one day, let me be beautiful. The hole never answered, but it didn’t turn away either.
One evening, I was sitting in the stoop chatting with a hole when Maria came and sat next to me, even though she’d always sworn the holes were evil. She brought a candle and said maybe we should pray. I said maybe we should just listen. We sat there, the two of us, legs swinging over nothing, until the candle burned out. She cried. I didn’t.
The ground kept disappearing. People said the whole city would fall in. I wondered if maybe that was the point. Maybe the holes weren’t erasing us but remaking us, digging down to something softer, stranger, freer. Maybe the earth was tired of being paved over. Maybe it was just tired of holding our weight and pretending not to buckle.
Last week, I leaned a little farther forward, trying to see if the hole had a bottom. For the first time, I thought I saw something down there: a shimmer, a pulse, maybe even a light. It looked like a body waiting. A body shaped like mine, but softer, kinder.
I don’t know if I’ll jump. But it feels good to know the option’s there, that somewhere below this cracked and violent surface, another world is breathing.