To Fall In Love With a City
You know how the way the light looks at any given moment can just take you back somewhere?
It’s uncanny the way these angular buildings lit up by the warm summer dark remind me so much of it: a face framed by sleeping willow trees, he smiled to me when I stepped out of the car to meet him on that uptown street. I smiled back.
I smiled when our hands swung together, a pendulum for the rhythm of our feet hitting the deepest green grass I ever saw. To the bookstore, we went and read side by side like we had a million times before. In my hands was Brontë; in his, Cicero. That first night we were charmed by each other’s sleepy delirium in that dorm room bed, nodding off to the tune of our giggles.
Oh, I can still feel the morning when I first met the masterly Mrs. Sun. Returned from her night out at sea, she threw mist upon her steamboats bellowing below — what a privilege to watch! She fashioned a naturalist painting, knowing and not caring a bit that it would be painted over again later that day! The clouds overtook her canvas and they hastened my heartbeat — do you know the thrill of a summer storm?
On that August day, the world was heavy with a crowd of party-goers awaiting their host. And arrived, she did! Her speak-easy rains showered down on us all for a few moments of celebration; then she left: our elusive queen.
The next day, he and I wandered through the swampy air — the kind of air that takes you like a hug from a sweet grandmother who isn’t yours. He must not have been under the same spell as I, however, for he was preoccupied with the way the air “reeked of sewage underground.” I was unbothered. I couldn’t help but be entranced by the oak trees around us: those ancient voodoo lords. They called to me, daring me to tread deeper along the haunted river they overhung. And I did.
I escaped so far that I forgot all about the pessimistic man beside me. Me, my city, and our moment of black magic transformed him into someone else: someone capable of existing with magic and me. We were two ghosts, floating together along the river in an in-between, unsure kind of peace.
But one too many annoying droplets of sweat rolled down my temple, and I materialized again.
I knew and he knew that amid these boxes and baskets of the dorm room, the sun was setting on our summer. I don’t know how it is possible to feel nostalgia for the moment one is standing right in the middle of, but I knew I would miss the language we spoke with each other, and that rebel kid I saw in his eyes. I would miss yanking off our shoes and peeling off our socks to slosh through the flooded uptown streets, all because our taxi couldn’t make it any further in that beautiful summer storm.
The lights, trees, storms — the endless supply of magic.
It’s not hard to trick a hopeless romantic into falling for the only place where she could live a Gothic novel in the flesh.
With ease, I marveled at the sea of litter flowing down Frenchman Street — the neon lights have a black-magical way of letting you forget the struggle is there. Just like those lights, I painted over his open wounds with my own technicolor dreams, never returning to reality to dress them. A city like this can make someone like me think that learning the voodoo craft is a viable career option. Most of us, though, will be content to settle for the magic of summer rains and the dark brown eyes of thoughtful boys.
New Orleans is where I found my first mature love.
