Nine Month Marked
Well, well, well, look at what we have here. Today, May 29, marks nine months since Hurricane Katrina hit. You can have a baby in that time span. It's... well, it's rather mind-boggling. It's like, how can I have lived like this for nine months, when I know all of this isn't right?
I wore my clog shoes today. They're my bad-luck shoes. (I have a good luck shirt, bad luck shoes, and good luck earrings.) I figured that since I was taking my geometry final today, I might as well wear my bad-luck shoes because no matter how the exam went, it would still be geometry and therefore painful, so I might as well wear them. We got to the classroom and someone asked for the date and when I realized what it was, I turned around to Erin and said, "It's been nine months today." And Megan said something like "wow" and Erin said something like, "We're all jinxed." Sooo.... my bad luck shoes? They have another name. They're my Katrina shoes. I bought them in Texas because I only had flip flops and a pair of sneakers that I didn't even fit in, and my school didn't allow flip flops. Since I wasn't going to spend months trying to squeeze my feet into shoes with holes in them, we went out and bought one pair of shoes. Katrina=bad luck, so....
S'all connected, folks.
Anyway, I got my Literary Club magazine today (only got it early b/c they published my poem). Naturally, the theme this year was Katrina... Eyes of the Storm, thought of by yours truly. (It's the first time I ever came up with a title or the works that got picked.) I came home and read it and even though I've seen them all before, because I was on the team putting it together, they never hit me as hard as they did today. I cried. Hard.
I am so very, very tired of it. I know I say that a lot, but truly, I am physically exhausted just from thinking of everything that's happened. Couldn't it all STOP for just one moment, and for just... I dunno, ten minutes, that's all I need, just for ten minutes, and let us live our lives before Katrina. Just ten minutes, to erase everything from our minds and we can have a moment of peace.
But I guess that really wouldn't solve everything, because after those ten minutes we'd have to face reality and it would smack us in the face.
I think JKR had it down pat when she wrote: "If I thought I could help you," Dumbledore said gently, "by putting you into an enchanted sleep and allowing you to postpone the moment when you have to think about what has happened tonight, I would do it. But I know better. Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it."
I can't think of any better way to put it. Katrina's been like a permanent leech on my mind, for lack of a better analogy, just sucking, sucking away and leaving me with a headache that won't go away. You can't exactly go anywhere to forget about it. School? Psh- that was one of the hardest places hit. Home? Just look out the window, any window. Can't go out to eat, or to the store- some places still aren't open, or have hours closing at 7. Restaurants have limited menus. Some stores have left. I'm still having trouble accepting that my favorite bookstore will never open again; that it's leaving and never again will I walk into my place of sanctuary. Where do you go?
You don't. You don't go anyway. You sit here and stare out the window and think, Just ten minutes! And you know it wouldn't help.
It's the strangest feeling to sit in my butterfly chair- a chair I wouldn't have if I hadn't needed to redo my room after Katrina- and think, My life has been changed forever. It's not a, "Omg, we had a baby, our lives are changed!!" kind of thing. It's a, "Wow. Just... gah. I will never be the same again. None of this will ever be the same." New Orleans can come back better than before, but it won't be the same. There will always be that feeling of uneasiness, that knowing that something bad happened. Millions of years from now, kids will read about this massive storm that almost killed New Orleans. At least, that's what I figure. I know Louisiana textbooks'll have it.
And, you know, there's always the inevitable question, "If I could, would I stop Katrina from happening?" And, you know, everyone answers, "No, I don't think I would, because of all I gained from it." Lookit me, I gained Angela, and Max, and stronger friendships and a much more mature state of mind. I gained Missie and a knowledge of sorts and an attitude of some sort of weird acceptance, yet also slight defiance, that I don't think I would have right now if not for Katrina. But still. It's hard not to look back at that tantalizing memory of life before the storm and say, "I wish...".
It's hard. Like, you've got this exterior that's all, "Rrr! Yay! Clean-up! We are putting all of this mad energy into rebuilding and efforts and good, wholesome, New Orleans fun!" But inside, there's this raging storm, if you'll pardon the word choice, that's going I hate this I hate this I hate this LET ME OUT I hate this! Not suicidal, no, but just... you just want to quit for a moment. Sit down and be let out of the game for a moment to rest and gather yourself back up so that you can maintain that exterior, get back in it all, and continue on, until you need another break. Some people can't get that break; I get it by coming to LJ and pouring all my thoughts out on you guys (sorry).
It's very weird to think, out of all the people in the world, out of the millions of different people I could have ended up being, I am a slip of a girl who lives in New Orleans. Of all the different lives I could have had, I ended up being this person who had to go through the hurricane. I'm not complaining (sometimes I do), but I am conscious of the fact that my life could be ten times worse. I could be in a third world country, or in the Middle East, or just a regular old person from Nevada where nothing BIG like this will ever happen in that person's life. It's like looking at a huge picture, and then you zoom in until all you're focused on is one little pixel, and that pixel is me. And we're all connected, but how did we end up being one specific pixel? It's the strangest feeling.
Feeling is very strange down here now. It's hard to find a good spot on the emotions scale where you feel comfortable with expressing your sorrow. Look at me, for example. From a Lakeview resident's perspective, my family did, in a sense, great during the storm- we had a place to stay, and we only came back with a few damages. From my perspective, we stayed in a crowded house with pets that made me sick and my room was fneh and I was very, very mixed up. But we got to come back to New Orleans to our own house and we didn't flood, so we have to be extraordinarily grateful. You have to be so careful when talking- I might mention how I was upset that water dripped down my bookcase and ruined it to a friend, and she might be able to say, "Yeah? Well, my whole house flooded eight feet. Water 'dripped' on EVERYTHING in my room." I will never forget sitting with Kaitlyn while she was eating lunch and when she got up to throw her trash away, I noticed that she put her plastic fork back in her lunchkit. I commented on it and she just turned to me and said, "Erica, we're leaving out of a FEMA trailer right now. We need all the help we can get." And sure, we all laughed it off, "Oh, haha, our city's so bad we save our plastic forks", but I felt awful. You don't know who lost their house or who's in a trailer or who did absolutely fine and doesn't want to get into damage talk, because it might make someone else feel uncomfortable.
So we all try and turn our troubles and tears to giggles and games, and we make fun of Katrina and do skits on Katrina and curse Katrina into oblivian with a jolly manner. Just last week my sister's drama group did a presentation on the hurricane, and it was downright hilarious. The audience was laughing hysterically. They made fun of FEMA, they made fun of us, they made fun of the hurricane, they made fun of visiting reporters ("Look! A real looter! Can you say HEADLINER??"), they made fun of it all under the sun and turned it into a big joke, but after we were done laughing and we settled down, it was like... yeah. That's our life now. Best friends moved away, favorite stores closed, traumatized, more or less, and that's just from me. Others lost family members, had deaths in the family, lost property, houses, items, so on. And you listen to all the stories and you share people's pain, especially if it's worse than yours, and you feel awful and guilty for feeling sorry for yourself... and then you feel kinda... I dunno. You do want to grieve for yourself, after all, but it's hard to find a place and a person to tell it to. So thank you very much for reading and listening and letting me pour it all out in the best way I can, speaking so that I get my feelings out and away from me, and explaining at the same time, because I really want other people to know.
Another very prominent feeling down here is, of course, anger. Angry at God, angry at the government, angry at anyone who could potentially be blamed. Personally, I am not angry at God. I'm not particularly angry at our mayor; I don't care what he says, considering I live in the Metairie subdivision and we don't vote for NOLA's mayor. I don't even want to think about FEMA; I may feel like an adult in mindset, but I'm certianly not one yet, and I'm not worrying myself with what they're smoking. I'm angry at whoever built the levees- I think it was the Army Corp of Engineers; is that right? They, or whoever built the levees, cut corners one time-once-and now we all have to pay. I can't even get over the fact that the levee builders thought, oh, we won't take our time, we'll just get it done, it won't matter- and look what happened. If they had taken their damn time and built the levees the way they should have, the way they were paid to do it, then the levees would, most likely, not have broken, and half of what happened wouldn't have. A lot of the political stuff I don't trouble myself with (like Nagin, Broussard, and all their choices). I don't like talking politics and I always try to be so careful- I don't even like saying that stuff about FEMA, but oh well. But I'm just really, really disappointed in the people who built the levees.
But anger and "I wish" and "what if they hadn't" or "what if they had" won't change a thing, and I'm working on remembering that. We've all learned so many different life lessons down here over the course of Katrina. I feel... I don't know, I feel like I've grown up much faster than I should have. I feel so different from the immature little eighth grader running around the halls of MCA in her too-big Doc Martins and her bubble gum chapstick. I feel like I can look an adult in the eye and be on the same level, maturity-wise. (I don't know if that sounds conceited or what; it's just how I feel.) I know I haven't had half the troubles of taxes, children, jobs, etc., but I've had different troubles that have forced me to look at situations in a whole new light. I'm not happy with this whole growing up before it's my time thing; I don't want to grow up at all, but I feel like I'm being forced into the shoes of a mature person who has to take on the responsibilities I know I wouldn't have had before the storm. I savor the moments with my friends, when we can all act stupid and watch Napoleon Dynamite and talk about new, um, well, let's just say new teachers at school that are particularly fanciable. And we all try and keep our thoughts away from Katrina and sometimes we succeed, but most times, we don't. Most times, SOMETHING can always be linked to Katrina and we find ourselves slipping back into the void of seemingly hopelessness, and we use each to try and find a way out. No one wants that responsibility, but we all have it, and we owe it to each other.
Everyone wants to help everyone else, and we want someone to help us, too. When we first came back to school, my art class had to do theraputic art. This is my Katrina X. To those who've never seen an X like that before, well, I never knew of them either, until after the storm. When Lakeview flooded with its eight feet, and it receded, well, obviously people and pets who stayed behind died, right? Same in New Orleans and any area that could have flooded and people were dead. I dunno what group it was, but they had to go through the neighborhoods and check all the houses for bodies. After every house they checked, they marked the door, wall, whatever would show it with a big, bright orange or pinkish-red X. I dunno what exactly they put in each section, like the date they checked the house and other information, but one of the sections always contained the number of bodies they found dead. I remember when we were driving through Lakeview for the very first time after the storm and I looked up and saw a big X that said 1 DOG in the death section, and I felt like I was going to throw up. I didn't look at any more of the numbers after that, except when we got to MCA and I saw that my beloved school was scarred with a bright orange X on the convent, but thank God there was a 0 in the death section. Luckily, most of the Lakeview houses in the area we drove around in had a fat 0 marked on them, but I know some houses by a family friend's home had 1 or 2 deaths.
Anyway, to explain my therapy art: We had to draw different things in each of the four sections of the X. In the top section, we had to draw who we were before the storm, bottom, how we feel now, after it all, to the left, what we see for the city, and to the right, what we see for ourselves in the future.
Personally, I drew my name in the top and filled it with things I enjoy doing, to express the happy, care-free person I used to be. (Okay, okay, I wasn't carefree, but it certainly seems that way compared to now.) The E has pawprints all over it to symbolize my school's mascot, the cubs. The R has a computer on it, because, well, duh. The I is a pencil and the C paper, for writing, and the A has roses on it in honor of St. Therese and how I dreamed of being just like her. Below it is that old sun/moon symbol, to show my ups and downs during my old life- they just don't seem significant now. In the bottom section, I drew a large tear drop for my sadness, but the light reflecting off of it says HOPE, because, you know, there always HAS to be hope. If you don't have hope, then what else do you have? Nothing, that's what. Then there's the broom sweeping up the broken shards of normalcy. For my city, I see rebuilding and certainly happier times, hence all the new shiny buildings, and I see an influx in the way we celebrate New Orleans culture, hence the Mardi Gras beads. The waters are actually healing waters; I don't foresee more flooding (there may be, but that's not what they stand for). You can't see it, but I wrote "The Mighty Mississippi Guards Our City" in the water, and "healing waters" below it. Above, it says, "I see skies of blue..." like in the song. And finally, there's the fleur-de-lis sun, symbolizing God and hope and the spirit of good old New Orleans. And in the last section, for my personal future, there's the graduating degree/certificate with the brown ribbon and "2009" for Mount Carmel, and the world with a book because I want to write a book and change the world. (My own belief is that to change one mind, you've changed the world.) And, of course, there is the cross, for God. Because I know He's here. You just have to want to find Him.
So, am I therapytized? Am I counseled and pyschologically healed? No. Who knows how long it will take? I mean, nobody will EVER, ever be the same again down here, that's a fact. So now I must break into a Wicked song and sing, "WHO CAN SAAAAY... if I've been chaaaanged for the better, but.... because I knew you..................... because I knew you........... I have been chaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanged...... (no one mourns the Wicked) for... goood....." And yes, all the you's and Wicked's refer to Katrina, in my head.
And another Wicked song! "Every so often, we long to steal, to the land of what might have been... but that doesn't soften the ache we feel, when reality sets back in.... Don't wish, don't start, wishing only wounds the heart....."
And finally, finally, I leave you with the lyrics to "Calling All Angels" by Train:
I need a sign to let me know you're here
All of these lines are being crossed over the atmosphere
I need to know that things are gonna look up
'Cause I feel us drowning in a sea spilled from a cup
When there is no place safe and no safe place to put my head
When you feel the world shake from the words that are said
And I'm calling all angels
I'm calling all you angels
I need a sign to let me know you're here
'Cause my TV set just keeps it all from being clear
I want a reason for the way things have to be
I need a hand to help build up some kind of hope inside of me
And I'm calling all angels
I'm calling all you angels
When children have to play inside so they don't disappear
And private eyes solve marriage lies cause we don't talk for years
And football teams are kissing Queens
and losing sight of having dreams
In a world where what we want is only what we want until it's ours
I'm calling all angels
I'm calling all you angels
Dude, I dunno about the private eyes part, but the Saints won their first game after Katrina, I think. *giggle snort*
So adieu, adieu, until I make my next post on June 1, which, as all of New Orleans knows... is the official beginning of the 2006 Hurricane Season.
I wore my clog shoes today. They're my bad-luck shoes. (I have a good luck shirt, bad luck shoes, and good luck earrings.) I figured that since I was taking my geometry final today, I might as well wear my bad-luck shoes because no matter how the exam went, it would still be geometry and therefore painful, so I might as well wear them. We got to the classroom and someone asked for the date and when I realized what it was, I turned around to Erin and said, "It's been nine months today." And Megan said something like "wow" and Erin said something like, "We're all jinxed." Sooo.... my bad luck shoes? They have another name. They're my Katrina shoes. I bought them in Texas because I only had flip flops and a pair of sneakers that I didn't even fit in, and my school didn't allow flip flops. Since I wasn't going to spend months trying to squeeze my feet into shoes with holes in them, we went out and bought one pair of shoes. Katrina=bad luck, so....
S'all connected, folks.
Anyway, I got my Literary Club magazine today (only got it early b/c they published my poem). Naturally, the theme this year was Katrina... Eyes of the Storm, thought of by yours truly. (It's the first time I ever came up with a title or the works that got picked.) I came home and read it and even though I've seen them all before, because I was on the team putting it together, they never hit me as hard as they did today. I cried. Hard.
I am so very, very tired of it. I know I say that a lot, but truly, I am physically exhausted just from thinking of everything that's happened. Couldn't it all STOP for just one moment, and for just... I dunno, ten minutes, that's all I need, just for ten minutes, and let us live our lives before Katrina. Just ten minutes, to erase everything from our minds and we can have a moment of peace.
But I guess that really wouldn't solve everything, because after those ten minutes we'd have to face reality and it would smack us in the face.
I think JKR had it down pat when she wrote: "If I thought I could help you," Dumbledore said gently, "by putting you into an enchanted sleep and allowing you to postpone the moment when you have to think about what has happened tonight, I would do it. But I know better. Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it."
I can't think of any better way to put it. Katrina's been like a permanent leech on my mind, for lack of a better analogy, just sucking, sucking away and leaving me with a headache that won't go away. You can't exactly go anywhere to forget about it. School? Psh- that was one of the hardest places hit. Home? Just look out the window, any window. Can't go out to eat, or to the store- some places still aren't open, or have hours closing at 7. Restaurants have limited menus. Some stores have left. I'm still having trouble accepting that my favorite bookstore will never open again; that it's leaving and never again will I walk into my place of sanctuary. Where do you go?
You don't. You don't go anyway. You sit here and stare out the window and think, Just ten minutes! And you know it wouldn't help.
It's the strangest feeling to sit in my butterfly chair- a chair I wouldn't have if I hadn't needed to redo my room after Katrina- and think, My life has been changed forever. It's not a, "Omg, we had a baby, our lives are changed!!" kind of thing. It's a, "Wow. Just... gah. I will never be the same again. None of this will ever be the same." New Orleans can come back better than before, but it won't be the same. There will always be that feeling of uneasiness, that knowing that something bad happened. Millions of years from now, kids will read about this massive storm that almost killed New Orleans. At least, that's what I figure. I know Louisiana textbooks'll have it.
And, you know, there's always the inevitable question, "If I could, would I stop Katrina from happening?" And, you know, everyone answers, "No, I don't think I would, because of all I gained from it." Lookit me, I gained Angela, and Max, and stronger friendships and a much more mature state of mind. I gained Missie and a knowledge of sorts and an attitude of some sort of weird acceptance, yet also slight defiance, that I don't think I would have right now if not for Katrina. But still. It's hard not to look back at that tantalizing memory of life before the storm and say, "I wish...".
It's hard. Like, you've got this exterior that's all, "Rrr! Yay! Clean-up! We are putting all of this mad energy into rebuilding and efforts and good, wholesome, New Orleans fun!" But inside, there's this raging storm, if you'll pardon the word choice, that's going I hate this I hate this I hate this LET ME OUT I hate this! Not suicidal, no, but just... you just want to quit for a moment. Sit down and be let out of the game for a moment to rest and gather yourself back up so that you can maintain that exterior, get back in it all, and continue on, until you need another break. Some people can't get that break; I get it by coming to LJ and pouring all my thoughts out on you guys (sorry).
It's very weird to think, out of all the people in the world, out of the millions of different people I could have ended up being, I am a slip of a girl who lives in New Orleans. Of all the different lives I could have had, I ended up being this person who had to go through the hurricane. I'm not complaining (sometimes I do), but I am conscious of the fact that my life could be ten times worse. I could be in a third world country, or in the Middle East, or just a regular old person from Nevada where nothing BIG like this will ever happen in that person's life. It's like looking at a huge picture, and then you zoom in until all you're focused on is one little pixel, and that pixel is me. And we're all connected, but how did we end up being one specific pixel? It's the strangest feeling.
Feeling is very strange down here now. It's hard to find a good spot on the emotions scale where you feel comfortable with expressing your sorrow. Look at me, for example. From a Lakeview resident's perspective, my family did, in a sense, great during the storm- we had a place to stay, and we only came back with a few damages. From my perspective, we stayed in a crowded house with pets that made me sick and my room was fneh and I was very, very mixed up. But we got to come back to New Orleans to our own house and we didn't flood, so we have to be extraordinarily grateful. You have to be so careful when talking- I might mention how I was upset that water dripped down my bookcase and ruined it to a friend, and she might be able to say, "Yeah? Well, my whole house flooded eight feet. Water 'dripped' on EVERYTHING in my room." I will never forget sitting with Kaitlyn while she was eating lunch and when she got up to throw her trash away, I noticed that she put her plastic fork back in her lunchkit. I commented on it and she just turned to me and said, "Erica, we're leaving out of a FEMA trailer right now. We need all the help we can get." And sure, we all laughed it off, "Oh, haha, our city's so bad we save our plastic forks", but I felt awful. You don't know who lost their house or who's in a trailer or who did absolutely fine and doesn't want to get into damage talk, because it might make someone else feel uncomfortable.
So we all try and turn our troubles and tears to giggles and games, and we make fun of Katrina and do skits on Katrina and curse Katrina into oblivian with a jolly manner. Just last week my sister's drama group did a presentation on the hurricane, and it was downright hilarious. The audience was laughing hysterically. They made fun of FEMA, they made fun of us, they made fun of the hurricane, they made fun of visiting reporters ("Look! A real looter! Can you say HEADLINER??"), they made fun of it all under the sun and turned it into a big joke, but after we were done laughing and we settled down, it was like... yeah. That's our life now. Best friends moved away, favorite stores closed, traumatized, more or less, and that's just from me. Others lost family members, had deaths in the family, lost property, houses, items, so on. And you listen to all the stories and you share people's pain, especially if it's worse than yours, and you feel awful and guilty for feeling sorry for yourself... and then you feel kinda... I dunno. You do want to grieve for yourself, after all, but it's hard to find a place and a person to tell it to. So thank you very much for reading and listening and letting me pour it all out in the best way I can, speaking so that I get my feelings out and away from me, and explaining at the same time, because I really want other people to know.
Another very prominent feeling down here is, of course, anger. Angry at God, angry at the government, angry at anyone who could potentially be blamed. Personally, I am not angry at God. I'm not particularly angry at our mayor; I don't care what he says, considering I live in the Metairie subdivision and we don't vote for NOLA's mayor. I don't even want to think about FEMA; I may feel like an adult in mindset, but I'm certianly not one yet, and I'm not worrying myself with what they're smoking. I'm angry at whoever built the levees- I think it was the Army Corp of Engineers; is that right? They, or whoever built the levees, cut corners one time-once-and now we all have to pay. I can't even get over the fact that the levee builders thought, oh, we won't take our time, we'll just get it done, it won't matter- and look what happened. If they had taken their damn time and built the levees the way they should have, the way they were paid to do it, then the levees would, most likely, not have broken, and half of what happened wouldn't have. A lot of the political stuff I don't trouble myself with (like Nagin, Broussard, and all their choices). I don't like talking politics and I always try to be so careful- I don't even like saying that stuff about FEMA, but oh well. But I'm just really, really disappointed in the people who built the levees.
But anger and "I wish" and "what if they hadn't" or "what if they had" won't change a thing, and I'm working on remembering that. We've all learned so many different life lessons down here over the course of Katrina. I feel... I don't know, I feel like I've grown up much faster than I should have. I feel so different from the immature little eighth grader running around the halls of MCA in her too-big Doc Martins and her bubble gum chapstick. I feel like I can look an adult in the eye and be on the same level, maturity-wise. (I don't know if that sounds conceited or what; it's just how I feel.) I know I haven't had half the troubles of taxes, children, jobs, etc., but I've had different troubles that have forced me to look at situations in a whole new light. I'm not happy with this whole growing up before it's my time thing; I don't want to grow up at all, but I feel like I'm being forced into the shoes of a mature person who has to take on the responsibilities I know I wouldn't have had before the storm. I savor the moments with my friends, when we can all act stupid and watch Napoleon Dynamite and talk about new, um, well, let's just say new teachers at school that are particularly fanciable. And we all try and keep our thoughts away from Katrina and sometimes we succeed, but most times, we don't. Most times, SOMETHING can always be linked to Katrina and we find ourselves slipping back into the void of seemingly hopelessness, and we use each to try and find a way out. No one wants that responsibility, but we all have it, and we owe it to each other.
Everyone wants to help everyone else, and we want someone to help us, too. When we first came back to school, my art class had to do theraputic art. This is my Katrina X. To those who've never seen an X like that before, well, I never knew of them either, until after the storm. When Lakeview flooded with its eight feet, and it receded, well, obviously people and pets who stayed behind died, right? Same in New Orleans and any area that could have flooded and people were dead. I dunno what group it was, but they had to go through the neighborhoods and check all the houses for bodies. After every house they checked, they marked the door, wall, whatever would show it with a big, bright orange or pinkish-red X. I dunno what exactly they put in each section, like the date they checked the house and other information, but one of the sections always contained the number of bodies they found dead. I remember when we were driving through Lakeview for the very first time after the storm and I looked up and saw a big X that said 1 DOG in the death section, and I felt like I was going to throw up. I didn't look at any more of the numbers after that, except when we got to MCA and I saw that my beloved school was scarred with a bright orange X on the convent, but thank God there was a 0 in the death section. Luckily, most of the Lakeview houses in the area we drove around in had a fat 0 marked on them, but I know some houses by a family friend's home had 1 or 2 deaths.
Anyway, to explain my therapy art: We had to draw different things in each of the four sections of the X. In the top section, we had to draw who we were before the storm, bottom, how we feel now, after it all, to the left, what we see for the city, and to the right, what we see for ourselves in the future.
Personally, I drew my name in the top and filled it with things I enjoy doing, to express the happy, care-free person I used to be. (Okay, okay, I wasn't carefree, but it certainly seems that way compared to now.) The E has pawprints all over it to symbolize my school's mascot, the cubs. The R has a computer on it, because, well, duh. The I is a pencil and the C paper, for writing, and the A has roses on it in honor of St. Therese and how I dreamed of being just like her. Below it is that old sun/moon symbol, to show my ups and downs during my old life- they just don't seem significant now. In the bottom section, I drew a large tear drop for my sadness, but the light reflecting off of it says HOPE, because, you know, there always HAS to be hope. If you don't have hope, then what else do you have? Nothing, that's what. Then there's the broom sweeping up the broken shards of normalcy. For my city, I see rebuilding and certainly happier times, hence all the new shiny buildings, and I see an influx in the way we celebrate New Orleans culture, hence the Mardi Gras beads. The waters are actually healing waters; I don't foresee more flooding (there may be, but that's not what they stand for). You can't see it, but I wrote "The Mighty Mississippi Guards Our City" in the water, and "healing waters" below it. Above, it says, "I see skies of blue..." like in the song. And finally, there's the fleur-de-lis sun, symbolizing God and hope and the spirit of good old New Orleans. And in the last section, for my personal future, there's the graduating degree/certificate with the brown ribbon and "2009" for Mount Carmel, and the world with a book because I want to write a book and change the world. (My own belief is that to change one mind, you've changed the world.) And, of course, there is the cross, for God. Because I know He's here. You just have to want to find Him.
So, am I therapytized? Am I counseled and pyschologically healed? No. Who knows how long it will take? I mean, nobody will EVER, ever be the same again down here, that's a fact. So now I must break into a Wicked song and sing, "WHO CAN SAAAAY... if I've been chaaaanged for the better, but.... because I knew you..................... because I knew you........... I have been chaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanged...... (no one mourns the Wicked) for... goood....." And yes, all the you's and Wicked's refer to Katrina, in my head.
And another Wicked song! "Every so often, we long to steal, to the land of what might have been... but that doesn't soften the ache we feel, when reality sets back in.... Don't wish, don't start, wishing only wounds the heart....."
And finally, finally, I leave you with the lyrics to "Calling All Angels" by Train:
I need a sign to let me know you're here
All of these lines are being crossed over the atmosphere
I need to know that things are gonna look up
'Cause I feel us drowning in a sea spilled from a cup
When there is no place safe and no safe place to put my head
When you feel the world shake from the words that are said
And I'm calling all angels
I'm calling all you angels
I need a sign to let me know you're here
'Cause my TV set just keeps it all from being clear
I want a reason for the way things have to be
I need a hand to help build up some kind of hope inside of me
And I'm calling all angels
I'm calling all you angels
When children have to play inside so they don't disappear
And private eyes solve marriage lies cause we don't talk for years
And football teams are kissing Queens
and losing sight of having dreams
In a world where what we want is only what we want until it's ours
I'm calling all angels
I'm calling all you angels
Dude, I dunno about the private eyes part, but the Saints won their first game after Katrina, I think. *giggle snort*
So adieu, adieu, until I make my next post on June 1, which, as all of New Orleans knows... is the official beginning of the 2006 Hurricane Season.