How to Migrate

My room in the Airbnb is Grateful Dead-themed. Tour posters surround the walls: skeletons, bears, a turtle with a VW bus on its shell. It doesn’t feel like July in this room. It feels far colder, like the stark brink of winter. The central AC blasts through the basement as if carrying out a vendetta. I pull the soft green blanket from the base of my bed up to my chest. Aurora curls at my side. I reach to pet her, but the neck brace stops me—a pinching reminder I am still healing from the impact two weeks prior.

This was my second car crash. The first happened when I was 12, maybe 13. I was in the back seat and didn’t realize I was bleeding until I felt hot liquid stream down my left eye, blurring my vision. At first, I thought something was leaking from above. I tried to wipe it away, but one look at my fingers told me it was blood.

My mom screamed. My sister, B, who was in the front passenger seat, turned, took one look at me, and tore the white soccer jersey she was wearing off her back, pressing it into my hands so I could clot the open gash on my forehead. If you ever need to know what kind of person B is, that moment says it all.

I remember the ambulance, the stitches, the crescent scar that still curves across my hairline. I remember my dad urging me to use scar cream so the mark wouldn’t stay, and me secretly resisting, because it reminded me of Harry Potter.

This time was different. I was driving alone. The intersection lights were broken, red and blinking in all directions. I remember looking. Moving forward. And then, the impact: sudden and wrenching. Metal on metal. Air bags. Smoke. You did nothing wrong, the officer told me, but guilt sank through me anyway, straight to the core of an ancient wound.

Grief rose out of me the next morning like a dormant volcano erupting—residual magma of old trauma mixing with the new. And with its release, a sharpened reverence for the gift of being alive.

Now I am here, in this freezing Grateful Dead basement, wearing a neck brace, with little to do but think about everything that came before, and the hope of a newly reclaimed future.

I look at the turtle with the VW bus on his back and think of blue horizons, of great ocean migrations. It’s time to move on—on many levels. My words have been asking me for a new home for quite some time, and I must answer their call. Much like the turtle knows it cannot stay at its original shore, I too must continue the voyage. I trust the wisdom of the tide, while knowing the sea is not always kind. Waves crash; shadows lurk. Still, the turtle swims.

The title of my next blog comes to me: How to Migrate. But the will to write it has left my body. I know what it asks of me. I’ve known for a while. But knowing and doing are two different things, and I’m not ready to take action just yet. For now, I must rest in the ocean’s current and let the saltwater carry me until I am ready to swim again.

Perhaps in August, I will begin migrating to Substack, a new home for my words. Moving to a new platform feels like stepping into a vaster, less predictable ocean, where currents can carry my words farther—into inboxes, across continents.

I will need to learn this new water as I would a soulmate: investing deeply in the connection, and ultimately, in myself. It asks for a depth I must be ready to meet, an honor I choose to take seriously (because I’m a Serious person). And that kind of commitment must come from a space of grounded realism, not wishful thinking.

There’s a mythic quality to turtle migration: they return to the exact beach where they began, no matter how far they’ve roamed. Yet, they can only return by first leaving the shore. Isn’t our path much the same—a journey that ebbs and flows, carrying us outward and back, only for us to realize we were always the ocean?

Migration is an act of faith: faith that the ocean will hold you, faith that the shore you’re swimming toward exists, faith that you carry the map inside you, even if you can’t yet see the land.

Much of my early writing came from a longing for permanence. I wanted to be heard, to be remembered. Now, my motivation feels clean: I write because I’m a writer.

And so, the writing continues. The migration has begun. Meet me on Substack. 🐢

by David Courbit