Do You Know What It Means...

Sitting in my apartment, I can stare out into the night through massive windows. There are train tracks that run right by my place, and I love the sound the train makes as it goes by. It reminds me of summers in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, visiting my great-grandmother. It soaks me in nostalgia for slow Southern towns: sad, damaged, and beautiful.

Today, I am missing New Orleans. The one that got away, the would-be love of my life. I heard the mournful call of that train’s whistle and I knew it was headed to The Crescent City, heartbreak in tow. My heart fills with love when I think of the tenacity of that city. Abandoned and broken, forsaken and neglected, she still manages to project royalty, even in the tattered remnants of her FEMA gown and shredded levees.

In September, I tried to go to her. Bought work gloves as a symbol of my commitment to take on her grit and her grime. I wanted the skin on my back to be bronzed in the radiance of the NOLA sun, to take walks with the ghosts on the edge of The French Quarter, keep close counsel with the spirit guides. It was my Mecca, a pilgrimage for heart, mind, and body. I wanted to donate myself to the reincarnation, however small the bridges I might build.

But hurricanes took back the rest of what they left behind, leaving me stranded and continuing to write my love letters to New Orleans.

Maybe she dodges me with the artful coyness of a true muse, my continued devotion deepening with each taste of her quixotic delights. She is an old soul, practiced in the fine art of keeping hearts. Some people never leave her, not even in death, and they can be felt throughout the streets, down ivy-ed alleyways, between the mausoleums.

It snowed in New Orleans today, which is like saying the Midwestern cornfields sprouted roots of gold. What is the world coming to?