New Orleans Geographic

I told everybody how much I wanted to leave. In the end, I was the one who stayed.

It started with summer.

I’ve always joked that the best way to live in New Orleans would be to leave from May to October, when everyone goes a little crazy from indolence and constant, low-grade heatstroke. Maybe you could rent a cottage on the East Coast, I’d say, or go abroad.

Obviously (to me) this was a joke, an unrealistic fantasy. I was surprised as hell when my friends started announcing plans to “summer” elsewhere. One woman was going to teach mountain biking in Colorado; someone else was going to a writer’s colony. “I’ll be back…probably,” they told me.

I envied their plans, sighed, and assessed my shorts-and-flip-flops situation.

Then came the Facebook posts. All at once, my feed was choked with long, poetic farewells to the excesses of Carnival, the swamp’s decomposing backdrop, the jewel-box houses, the rotating cast of eccentrics who call the city home. It’s been said that you don’t just move away from New Orleans; you have to break up with it. I’ve had three friends in as many months call it quits — this may not sound like much, but it’s a small town.

I read these posts sitting on the bed in my third-floor but still roach-friendly apartment, or in Lafayette Square on my lunch break. I have to smile at the way things turned out. I spent the last five years telling anyone who would listen how much I wanted to move away. There’s no professional opportunity here, I said. People drink too much. I probably drink too much. “I’m tired of all the navel-gazing,” I said. “The only thing anyone ever talks about is how magical the city is. It’s nauseating.” Friends described their feelings about the city as a love-hate relationship. I said mine was more like a hate-hate thing.

And then my life blew up.

Inside of a year, my long-term relationship imploded, I moved twice, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, and I quit my job. I socked away money in a separate bank account and scanned Craigslist for rentals in Baltimore, DC, Chicago — my classic list of anywhere-but-heres. I ended up spending that money on a security deposit and furnishings for a new apartment uptown, in the neighborhood where I lived just after Katrina.

What changed? Certainly things weren’t good. A new relationship fizzled out painfully, like Pop Rocks. I cried a lot. I more or less went broke. Every day felt like it brought a new and exciting reason to be miserable. But the strangest things started to comfort me.

It wasn’t the postcard-perfect blue letters spelling street names on the sidewalks. But it was, on those same sidewalks, the seismic craters caused by bad urban planning and oak tree roots. The imperfections and dysfunctions that grated on me over the past decade began feeling like the knicks and scars on my knees — bumpy but familiar. I walked from downtown to Napoleon after Bacchus, watching hardworking men scoop garbage from the grimy streets, and thought about how this memory wasn’t pretty, but it was mine.

And I started doing things. I blew off my laundry, again, to hang out with friends at a housewarming party, or crawfish boil, or game night. I went to the zoo to visit the solemn-eyed gorillas and the majestically detached leopard. I got a job without much opportunity for advancement, but that opened up my weekends for the festival calendar that ticks clocklike in the background of New Orleans life. This month, I’ve scouted swimming pools under the bright-white June sky.

I knew the “wherever you go, there you are” cliche, but I never felt like it applied to me. It took a crisis for me to realize that my unhappiness wasn’t hitched to geography. Ups and downs are part of life, and I could either deal with the downswing in a new and unfamiliar city, or in a place where every corner store and oyster bar is a piece of my personal history. My friendships on location— the same old people at the same uninspired neighborhood bar, which had once felt stifling— became some of the most important things in my life. I can’t believe I let them go unappreciated for so long.

Some of those friends are gone now, but I know I’ll make new ones. For better or worse, this isn’t a city that fosters solitude. And I can’t promise you that I’ll be here forever; recent events have shown me that it’s pretty much impossible to predict the future. But I’ll be sticking it out for a while longer. It happened when I wasn’t paying attention: the city I chafed against, railed against, half-wished would sink into the sea, started to feel like home.

Title image credit to Ray Devlin.