(Click play to hear me read this post)
The coffee is hot and black so let’s start there. It is 3:03 in the late afternoon as the sunlight blips and blobs it’s way down through the mighty maple trees, which are being pushed around like rag dolls by the brutal autumn wind. The leaves aren’t falling as much as they are funneling horizontally, riding out the invisible waves. I’m drinking my coffee, cinnamon candle burning lower and lower into its self-made pool of blood red liquid.
I’m just back from New Orleans. My first visit. I traveled with my husband and my son, who was there attending a medical conference for cancer research. He’s working on his PhD. I’m endlessly impressed by his commitment to what he does. He’s brilliant. Objectively. I said what I said.
I carried him, timidly, bravely, tenderly, cluelessly, in my 18 yr old womb. He was not what any of us expected, and still isn’t. He is beyond and above and somehow miraculously, triumphantly, right here. I love him endlessly and gut-wrenchingly and forever. He can’t know the extent to which I do, but I hope he knows as best he can. That he is loved. That he was always loved from the first minute, even as scared stiff as I was to see the test register positive in my teenage hands. I wanted him instantly. I was terrified and petrified, and sure as fuck that he was mine and I was his and we were sticking with each other.
I didn’t care what anyone said. I didn’t care what anyone felt. I should have, I guess, but what do you know when you are 18?
I sit down to write but it’s cold out. I sit down to write but I am not a circus animal. I sit down to write but the coffee is hot and black and my cousin and I are texting back and forth about when to go get more coffee. And the wind is pushing the balding tree branches into the ground. Maybe I’ve already told you.
The fancy restaurant is too fancy. The waiter annoys me because we’ve barely sat down before he begins to rattle off fancy drinks and champagnes and wines so I look him in the face and as he’s mid-suggestion of the sixth or seventh ridiculous drink I say just a bit too loudly: I don’t drink. My delivery is deadpan and maybe comes off arrogant, but I only know what it’s like to be me. The woman at the next table turns full around, glass of red in hand, to stare at me. What can I say. Shit gets tiring.
I sit down to tell you about more of my trip to the Big Easy but so much happened in so little time, I hardly even took any photos. I’m the worst at taking photos. I always was but it’s gotten much worse. Since I ditched Instagram I stopped thinking that every fucking minute of every fucking experience was supposed to be snapped and pinned for others to enjoy instead of me. It’s all mine now. I’m here, now. The coffee is hot and black and I’m drinking it too fast. My fingers click across the keys. I make too many mistakes.
I wanted to tell you something very special, but I’m having trouble getting to it. Maybe it’s the coffee. Maybe it’s the trees in the wind or the way I get sometimes. There was a disheveled young man wandering Frenchman Street. He was shockingly thin and strikingly tall and the way he bent his limbs struck me as odd, almost like his elbows might be such that his forearms could rotate 360 degrees.
He was shouting — even though the street was quiet in the descending dark — that no one was unique; I’ve no idea what prompted him to do so. The way he said it was “Nobody’s u-fuckin-nique!” A bunch of young girls laughed, which encouraged him and he repeated it over again. He was smiling big and completely disinterested.
There is a bar you can sit at and it spins while you drink. The Carousel Bar. Neat. I had a tonic and lime and laughed when the bartender made a joke about drinking so much the room would spin, or something innocent and nauseating like that. The list of drinks was so long it filled a leather bound book. I only ever wanted wine. Enough to fill an ocean and then some. Even when I restrained myself, I could feel the want pressing on my insides, like my skin was a dam about to break and if I could just have as much as I really wanted I’d finally drown. I’d finally be free. I didn’t want to hurt anything; I wanted to disappear.
The problem with drinking is that it washes you too far away. The problem with writing is it gets you too close.
I sit down to write for you. I sit down to try to tell you something unique. But the wind is pushing at the trees. And the trees just have to take it, and they do.
Really beautiful writing. I was here with you, in these moments.
“I don’t drink. My delivery is deadpan and maybe comes off arrogant, but I only know what it’s like to be me. The woman at the next table turns full around, glass of red in hand, to stare at me. What can I say. Shit gets tiring.”
So tiring. I understand. 🙏