It is an honor to be here today. Thank you to the Breakthrough Miami Team for entrusting me to share what is surely just a page out of the book of Breakthrough stories that you have carried out to publication over the years. I would also like to thank the THesis Hotel for holding space for this event in such a generous capacity. It is my first time here and I have to admit that I am strangely drawn to the name. Thesis, a word that would conjure harrowing images of late nights fueled by coffee and rearranged chapters for my newly graduated peers only a few months ago, here, now, takes on a new grandeur, encouraging that we “get lost” in all it has to offer. It is an approach to life that reminds me of the route I took to Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart as a Breakthrough Scholar in middle school. Around seven in the morning, waiting for a yellow bus to pick me up from Miami Gardens, the beauty of being the first stop on the route, in addition to having your pick of the seats — not under the AC unit or on top of the bump that makes room for the wheel — was that I could go back to sleep and squeeze in a full REM cycle. And when I woke, I was greeted with a land akin to paradise and funny enough, a garden by a different name: El Jardín they called it. Tall hedges that scraped the sky, hand-carved lore chiseled near the roof, intricate tiles to walk on, and in the center, after passing through a grand entrance, was a courtyard with a fountain. In fact, if you stood in just the right spot, that fountain overlooked another fountain in two different directions. Over time, I came to know which door had a narrow staircase that led you through a winding tunnel out onto a pool guarded by limestone — a morsel of the ensorcelling view of Biscayne Bay.
