Falling up

I am not sure how to write about my feelings for New Orleans. So many people have; it’s almost a cliché. But though my emerging attachment to this place is hardly unique, it is real and mysterious enough for me to want to share.

Before becoming a NOLA transplant, I spent 7 years in Ithaca, New York--not a place I was lukewarm about. During several years away, living in New Mexico, Virginia, and Alabama, it haunted me. There is a joke that because Ithaca is in a valley, it boasts a gravity that sucks people back in. In my house in Alabama where, as a poetry grad student, I spent most of each day writing, I had daydreamed of Ithaca: the lake with different colors of ice; waterfalls gushing each spring; the tidy grid of streets, yards messy with flowers; the high likelihood of glimpsing Tibetan Buddhist monks around in red and orange robes. During my last stint in I-town (as it is called), I often walked with Sara in her stroller along Cascadilla Creek. Watching the ducks or geese drifting by, and dreadlocked youths streaming in and out of Gimme Coffee across from a pretty park, I felt I was in a paradise of beauty and simplicity.

When it was time to leave, I did not want to go. Like, at all. I envisioned myself buying one of the Victorians in the coveted Fall Creek neighborhood and settling in. At the time I could have done so (probably a ranch, not a Victorian) thanks to an inheritance from my grandmother. I had a support network of friends and my mom 3 hours away to help with Sara; she and I lived in a spacious apartment in one of the downtown’s “high-rise” buildings (i.e., it had 5 floors) where there was a balcony from which we could see the whole city and surrounding farmland. Packing up in July 2009, I felt a huge ache.

At the time, my then-boyfriend and child’s father was heading to Tulane Law. Things between us were tenuous. If he left and I stayed, I felt, I would always wonder if I could have made it work, and would bear the responsibility of depriving my child of a day-to-day relationship with her dad. It was a natural time for me to think of leaving, too, since I craved a change in my career situation and—laughably—thought New Orleans would have more, not fewer, opportunities. Delusion is probably a big reason why anyone does anything in life.

But in the end, I moved because of a dream. I am not a religious person except when it comes to Mary of Guadalupe, whose images/statuettes have taken over my décor in the past ten years. So I prayed for an answer—stay or face an uncertain move—requesting that Mary’s response be as immediate and unambiguous as possible. That night, I dreamed that my boyfriend and I were in a boat together suspended in the sky over New Orleans. He skillfully guided the boat down to land on Lake Pontchartrain. It was like a precognitive dream for dummies.

The first months in New Orleans, though, were reminiscent of Biblical plagues rather than an affirmation of my divinely-guided choice. Car break-in and GPS theft were followed by months of scabies (if you don’t know what that is…good). The almost-immediate breakup with my boyfriend segued to 10 days of homelessness when the energy company killed the power at my new apartment. That October I somehow found myself on 3 leases at once, with no job; subsequently, over 6 months and with a Master’s, I could not land even one interview (eventually securing a temp position with the Census).

Yet New Orleans gave me things I didn’t even know I was missing. Ripe citrus on trees in November; king cake; the St. Charles streetcar lit up at night, full of tourists eager to abandon themselves to this place of muscular oaks and joyous funerals and decadent cuisine. Several friends I know of were arrested here in their youth, because it’s that kind of place where you do things to excess. When you lose, you lose big, and when you receive, you have more than your arms can hold.

Like any experience of love, my love for this city has been complicated. I resent the insufficient drainage system that causes water to gush up onto my lawn almost every time it rains; and I was exalted after the Superbowl win when people in the Carrollton neighborhood (where I watched the game) stopped their cars in the middle of the road, jumped out, and hugged strangers. Due to the endless summers, everyone always seems to be partying like it’s prom night or New Years, so there is pressure to make every day and night a tremendous event: to be, as one of my Counseling classmates labels it, a “fun-seeker.” If you feel isolated in such an atmosphere there is not much support, and it can be challenging to break into groups that have been established for years among locals.

Last Friday, I witnessed a brass band playing outside near Frenchmen Street, the bohemian hub of New Orleans nightlife. Watching the musicians, I didn’t want to stand still, and I could feel that happy energy in the crowd of strangers around me. Wanting to dance in a crowd outside is what this city is about. It is also about yellow-tape crime scenes and poor neighborhoods lacking any trees to shelter residents from the brutal months of heat, the monsoon-like rains. There is no illusion of anything being egalitarian or offered easily. When you can’t get a job in your field, your water is shut off due to a bureaucratic misunderstanding, and you are part of the massive population on Medicaid, there is a sense of living close to the fundamentals of life, having to discern and love what is of greatest value.

And I try to. I love that my daughter is growing up here, that—in contrast to my early, homogenous environment in the North—she is among kids of diverse backgrounds at daycare. I am excited that she will be able to claim this place, with its unique resemblance of European and Caribbean cities, as part of her identity. She won’t have to mumble, “I’m from…Jersey,” as I do every time someone asks my origins. Growing up in New Orleans will give Sara years of conversation at parties, at the very least.

As for me, what this place will provide in the final analysis (as my grandmother used to say) is a mystery. I have experienced its chaos and my own insecurity, felt keenly the Otherness that excludes and attracts me. Here, I am invited to be stronger than I have ever been rather than remaining a person who is self-characterized as “Falling Over” (the previous name of this blog). It is easy to fall: fall in love, fall apart. It’s a matter of gravity and of old patterns. It is harder, and richer, to rise.

Through the puddle

Just now a cloud has pulled up
while I was talking to the Emptiness

of the Universe and my voice plugged into the waves

at the bottom of the ocean.
–Jason Shinder

It was March and the sidewalks were full of rain, when the man I was newly seeing stopped our ungainly umbrella-walk to look at some children. There was a large puddle on the cement in front of us, and these kids were playing in it—taking advantage of another crappy Ithaca day and finding in it cause for lightheartedness. X., beside me, sighed deeply and said, “I guess I’m just going to have to go through the puddle.” He was referring to the fact that officially, he was still someone else’s, and he was going to have to go through all the fallout of ending a long-term love.

He is a man I still sometimes wonder about. If I hadn’t, six months later, moved to New Mexico for grad school (where he sent cakes and other whimsical gifts to me through the mail), would we have stayed together, married? He’s long since wed someone else, and after following suit into (and in my case, out of) matrimony, I have put the question to bed. But the puddle is still there, so to speak, and I’m beginning to realize—as New Orleans evinces its painfully abundant fall beauty—that this time I really do have to go through it.

In the puddle are heartache, loss, my own ambivalence about intimacy. It holds the things those of us who can’t fall asleep do to avoid getting into bed (and also the peace that might eventually find us, given a chance)—which, for me, is mostly aimlessly surfing the web, scrolling through photos on Facebook that represent all my far-flung friends, as if the images could become less flat and distant, could accompany me in this haunted interior murk that rises up when the noise and the lights die down, when my child is asleep in her pink plastic bed and I go in to turn the AC up and look at her closed and flowering face.

Letting my arms down

Since moving to New Orleans at the end of July, I have had my car broken into, contracted scabies, broken up, with great difficulty, a 4-year relationship with my child's father, and had one housing disaster after another: brief homelessness (through which I had to stay with my ex, who I had just left). Water shut off. Paying for 3 apartments at once, for over a month now: this happened when my ex and I sought separate housing. I couldn't move into the first one because I found out the neighbors were crazy and generally (possibly dangerously) invasive. I guess that wasn't a good enough reason to negate the lease, because I have now lost almost $2000 on a place I never set foot in for more than 10 minutes--a fact that keeps me up at night. I've talked to a lawyer but there is no clear way for me to get anything back; meanwhile the landlord keeps saying things like "Everyone in this situation is trying really hard" (to re-rent the apartment). Yes, but only I, out of all these earnest people, have lost $1800: so forgive me if I am not impressed with everyone else's "trying." Oh I'm sure they really, really care... The second apartment is the one Jon and I moved out of, for which we, too, have not been able to get new tenants since it's between semesters. Our daughter Sara has been sick 4 times in less than 4 months, including hospitalization with pneumonia. I have not been able to find a job and instead have found ever more elaborate ways to not find a job, such as joining ifreelance, a website where you bid for freelance jobs...against many, many people who are IDEALLY qualified for each job that comes up.

I've made this list lately in emails to friends or Facebook updates (that's how unhinged I'm getting...crying for help via status update) but I'm making it now from a different place. Maybe I'm not supposed to live in this town. Maybe it's not a safe place for a single mother and her 2-year-old. One could say that a job, a support network of friends or new love, and whatever else will all come in time. It could take years (as I know from experience in other towns), and I am starting to feel that I'm not up to it and do not want to keep subjecting Sara to this chaos. I say this because even as I have been--it feels like pelted with the hailstorm of New Orleans bad luck, there are many things I have been swooning over about this place. THE WEATHER. It's a bit nicer, especially in winter, than what I was used to in Ithaca. The luminously gothic, gorgeous-in-even-the-worst-neighborhoods architecture, coffee shops, culture, sheer variety and diversity of people and things to do. It's intoxicating and luring, like a love affair you know you shouldn't get into...rather than a nurturing partnership that will sustain me and my 2-year-old. Isn't it? I now live in a great apartment that is half of a house--a shotgun double--with a mantle/fireplace in every room, wood floors, a front porch...it's beautiful and fits all my furniture perfectly. But I am so depressed and broke I don't know how long I can stay here or how to enjoy it.

Today I feel tired and like...this is something a college ex-love used to say...letting my arms down. I think he meant it to denote some kind of surrender, admitting you're part of the human community; not being solitary and stuck. I'm sick of saying this will get better soon or is no big deal or I just need to fight, fight against every large external force to create the life I want. It shouldn't feel this hard. When I was packing to leave Ithaca, which I loved, in July, a thought floated across my mind that what I would learn in New Orleans is the pain of not listening to one's instincts and truth. I felt palpably that I should stay there, where I had a great support system of women, and family nearby; I knew the relationship wouldn't last despite all the complex reasons I still wanted it to...the relationship that I was following across the country with my cat, child, everything I owned, and no job. Four months in I still feel raw and scraped. I have discovered a lot of things, such as that the job I had in Ithaca (which I liked, but not the pay) was the best job on earth for the best salary ever and I cannot possibly do better as I appear to have no marketable skills, even after 12 years out of college; and now that job is gone. I've learned that boring can be good, if "boring" means continual access to the electrical grid and running water. I've learned that I have to create my life but it works better in happy, fertile soil rather than a blasted landscape of continual opposition. I've learned that romantic love, once and for all, won't save me though I have spent my adult life making plans that always put me off to the side somewhere, and the beloved in the center. I don't even know where I am anymore. And I need a lot of time, electricity, running water, and paychecks to find out, and then we'll see.