The Music that Floats In

I work downtown some evenings this semester and despite this emotional, haunting week one year post-Katrina, I am loving this city today. The building I'm in is old, as are all the buildings in the Quarter, and the walls aren't especially thick. I hear music all night. There's a restaurant across the street and the Man With The Sax plays from 6pm until long after I've turned out the lights and gone home.

I'm trying so hard to stop loving New Orleans. I need to leave, take the bar elsewhere, somewhere safer and closer to family and further from evacuations. I should work somewhere less foreign, more comfortable, less damaged, more promising. And yet I love this night music so much and I love the crawfish boils and the hot, hot spring and the constant green of this place.

I need to stop loving it here, or Here will tempt me to stay.