It's Been Too Long

I suppose it is fitting that I revive the blog on my city's birthday of choice. There's an hour and half left of this odd, lovely, broken, and laborious Mardi Gras so I suppose I will make the most of my alone time and detail what I have found of the city I left behind:

There are moments when I can forget Katrina ever existed. I can sit in the same corner of the same bar, in the same booth at the same restaurant, and sometimes I can order what I once ordered, drink what I once drank. But those moments are no longer normal, no longer expected. Comments are made. Even the new places, the spots I've found since returning, are peppered with scars. Delachaise, my favorite wine place and my favorite spot for discussing Katherine's nuptials, is beautiful and perfect. And one of its windows is boarded up. Still. And a boarded window is nothing, it is a tiny thing. A boarded window would be nothing to my friends waiting for their fema trailer. But the small things touch me now. Six months later, my city and my places are still lovely only to a certain point. The ugliness is as much a part of the experience now as the beauty once was.

I have mentioned to a few people that I am seriously considering staying here, that I can't imagine leaving, that law school feels like the beginning of a life here, not a transitional period. Part of me is afraid of what that could mean, staying in a city that is, on a good day, merely destroyed. New Orleans on a bad day? On a bad day I think maybe the city has ceased to exist, that it drowned beneath the waters and we are desperately trying to revive a shell of flesh. But even the bad days have some sick, solid, magical quality. Even the days I am exhausted by my life here, I feel like the exhaustion is an impetus in itself, that the terror of living amidst destruction is some variety of life I was built to embrace. I don't know.

I will always love walking around the Quarter with a friend, stopping for a beer, laughing, getting my heel stuck between cobblestones. I will never tire of the momentous and momentary exhultation that accompagnies a perfectly tossed bead, the shine of greens and purples and blues and golds hanging from those oaks. I will never stop thinking this city has a capacity for beauty that outshines this heavy Katrina mud.