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The mattresses. They're so sad.

I keep sharing this thought with people who scrunch up their brows. When there is so much to be sad about, why the ennui about an abandoned bed?

Because it's not natural to see mattresses piled along the road, three, four, five at a time. A mattress is a sanctuary, a piece of personal polymer where our bodies make us-shaped divots beneath us-shaped sweat constellations. A mattress: somewhere to doff the mask of the day. No soul should witness the bare pillowtop except the one changing the sheets.

No, is it not natural to see staggering hills of detritus becoming one of the most indelible images in the shadow of Hurricanes Helene and Milton here on the west coast of Florida.

Debris. Politicians and TV hosts and writers have uttered that word so often it starts to lose meaning. When Milton announced its intentions not two weeks after Helene, we all thought the debris would reanimate as catastrophic projectiles. Live oaks were uprooted left and right in Milton's winds, but much of the debris confoundingly stayed put.

Now, nearly a month from the outset of this domino of debacles, debris remains a combative sort of abstraction. It's a bureaucratic hot potato; the federal government is paying local counterparts to clean it up, but the process is proving achingly slow. Meanwhile, the moldy, toxic piles entice looters beyond all comprehension. I will be taking a long pause before buying anything on Facebook Marketplace.

But what is debris, really? It's more than a brown tangle waiting to be hauled into bigger brown tangles in dumping grounds along the highway. Debris is proof of existence. Debris is the contents of a life.

Meandering around the St. Pete Beach islands Thursday, the scene in Pass-a-Grille was shocking, a place ravaged and abandoned in time. This historic beach community punctuated with cheerful landmarks like Merry Pier was home to the county's first permanent barrier island settlers. Now, experts ask if settling in these places was ever a good idea, if rebuilding is wise.

Life here has been unzipped, turned inside out and hurled onto sandy, desolate sidewalks. But it's not debris.

It's dressers that held swimsuits and tropical print shorts, couches that cradled bodies during movie nights. Speakers that played dinner music and lamps that gave reading light. A travel pillow that comforted a tired neck.

Wine racks that promised warm fuzzies, party crowns and noisemakers that rang in a new year. A VHS collection of Disney movies, the ones in the real good puffy cases that surely someone never meant to throw away. A plastic Beauty dancing with a plastic Beast.

A spool of red thread. A blister pack of pills. A little zippered purse showing a sunset on Pass-a-Grille, a picture within a picture of a very different time.

Mattresses.

The doors of beach bar Shadracks stood open to an empty, silent street. The bartender was alone, but she said to come in. So, despite the 11:30 a.m. hour and my empty stomach, I let Wendy Weaver fish me a Coors Light out of a portable cooler. You've got to drink something in a bar like this.

She rode out Helene at a regular customer's house, a place with an 8-foot seawall. When she saw the water coming over that, she knew this was not a regular storm.

"The realest thing I've ever been through," she said.

Weaver lost her car, lost everything. She rode out Milton in the Keys, then returned to work where she's been hounding city workers to clear the mess. She cornered a trash collector who said they couldn't reach the dumpster. With her encouragement, turns out they could, in fact, reach the dumpster.

But here's the other thing. When your world becomes debris, when your stuff is poof, gone, life becomes strangely liberated. She can go anywhere, she said. North Florida, maybe. The mountains. Costa Rica.

"This is leading me to an even more beautiful life," she said. "I just know."

I Venmoed her because the card readers were down, and I tacked on some extra, a miniscule start when your world is on a curb.

I made my way to downtown St. Petersburg for lunch with co-workers. We sat at a picnic table, slumped in our formless storm malaise, when a rotten smell and plumes of smoke billowed from the distance. A scrap yard was on fire.

The lot was filled with hurricane debris, the remains of our former life.

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Stephanie Hayes is a columnist at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. Follow her at @stephhayes on X or @stephrhayes on Instagram.

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