Requiem for a Woman

What if the very thing that destroys you also saves you? In May 2005, I moved home to New Orleans after being away for 16 years in California. I was fighting demons. I had miscarried ten times. I had slept with my best friend, who was also my husband’s best friend. I was not in my best form. I had advanced into familiar chaos. I had been trying to build a family, better than the one I had known, but had unconsciously created the one I knew too well. 

The Water. My husband and I bought a house on Bayou St. John sight unseen. The water came up to the top step during the storm, and how I saw this was our house appeared in a Katrina retrospective at the New Orleans Museum of Art. I walked into the museum years after losing my husband, my lover, my house, my sense of self and there was our my house, the LaLa. The one my husband designed for me. My knees softened as rivulets of water seeped from my lids. 

We had evacuated to the butthole of America – I will not name it in case you are from there – but I will tell you this: there was no water anywhere there. Concrete and cars. I evacuated with my husband, my lover, his pregnant wife, his son, his mother in law and a coterie of dogs. We drank, smoked, lied, and cheated. None of us were in good form. 

I used to sit on my porch at the LaLa, the house I built by myself since my husband had moved back to California, and watch the pelicans return every October to dive for food in the bayou. The light in the gloaming I’m convinced is some sort of magic that only happens right there as seen from my porch. I was living in the house I wanted to grow old in, the LaLa, that my ex-husband had designed for me with windows my lover had designed for me, while my lover lived in the house he had built for his wife and their two children across town. My husband had returned to California, closer to the girlfriend who had left him in college, now his wife who had left her husband with their two children. 

I adopted my 9-month old son and brought him home to the LaLa. Then I lost my hair in the LaLa. I lost my career in the LaLa. I lost my retirement in the LaLa. A decade after Katrina, my son and I left the bayou and its light and moved to MidCity where water was not supposed to be, but water followed and sunk my truck. This happened while the City was hosting 10-year Katrina commemorations around the way, and I lay in the fetal position in my bed, and gunshots were fired outside my window. Rat a tat tat. Finally, I said we gotta get out of here.

A Boston psychic said you are going to have a couple of rough years, and my two girlfriends gasped and said, “Oh no! She’s already had rough years.” The psychic said you will need to be by water to meditate to get through this time. Psychic was spot on. The years that followed were bad. I was plagued by a golem who wanted my life. So I did what the psychic advised. I moved to Bay Saint Louis, by the water. I walked every morning to see the water that had destroyed my temple. I wanted to understand its power. I became thankful for water, in awe of it, after all, it was the water that destroyed the woman I was. 

This essay is in Studio Waveland’s “Silver Lining: 20 Years after Hurricane Katrina” along with work from over 50 artists reflecting on the devastation, resilience, and renewal displayed at ground zero of Katrina’s coming ashore.

[Thank you for reading my writing; I love hearing from you and
would love to gather your responses here, instead of on social media.]