Last week, I visited New Orleans, the city of imagination and deepest romance. The city I loved from afar until moving there, then
Going back there, after more than a decade away, I felt trepidation, imagining the depths of memory I might uncover. I feared the city might pull me back into her enchantment and that I would want to forsake my life and return to her forever. What I found, though, was a new city. A city with less mystery and lots more joy. A city that reflected back to me myself, just as she had in years prior. Does life always reflect back to us exactly what is in our souls? I suspect so.
In this new city, I found strange and unexpected revelations. I realized in the clearest and most straightforward manner, that although our bodies follow a relatively linear timeline, moving from birth to death in a standard number of years, our souls do not. Not at all. Our souls can be anywhere and everywhere while our bodies have a more limited sphere of interaction. I was sitting in a white rocking chair, with gas lights burning through the day and a fountain splashing on tropical plants below and writing in a journal. I was thinking of the soul’s journey as one resembling a spiral, or better yet, a Slinky. Within the space of the soul, time can expand or contract. Some days stretch for an eternity while others pass so quickly we struggle to catch them in the fine net of memory. I was thinking about how, with only my intention to do so, I was able to revisit the shotgun house I lived in on Hilary Street with the holes in the floorboards that let me spy on the feral cats below and the giant Lincoln-era manor I slept in on Magazine Street, I visited the now-defunct Poet’s Gallery with the naughty porcelain dolls with music boxes in their backs resting on secret penises. I could be in the dark warehouse that frequently hosted illuminated altar art exhibits or the library at Tulane where I spent hours looking at books on art and architecture and had the clearest revelation about why art mattered to culture.
It was all there. Everything. Waiting to be felt again. It occurred to me that nothing you have ever known is lost to you. My ex-husband’s dad passed away when he was a child, but he told me that once his father told him that other people live largely in the chemicals in our brains. We live in the memories of others, almost as real to them as we are in the flesh. I remembered this, and it made perfect sense. When he first recounted the wisdom, I thought the idea was just a way of comforting one’s self after loss, but rocking in that chair, I understood it and knew it was true.
I took a quick break from writing, deciding to post some photos to Instagram and saw a post from a friend. It was a collection of photos a woman I grew up with, Sarah, and the word “remembering.” Some people had commented with teary faces and I got a sick feeling. I checked the woman’s page, but there was no indication of anything amiss. I texted another friend and learned that Sarah had died of lung cancer the night before. She was only 42. She was beautiful and seemed healthy, a yoga instructor and a mom.
Sarah and I hadn’t been IRL friends since childhood. She was a year younger than me and after her family moved away from the block, our friendship, or more like kinship because living on the same block you feel more like cousins than friends, faded. But the news of her passing transported me into a place in my memory far more primal and significant that New Orleans. It put me square in the strange and beautiful landscape of childhood and I wept in a way that only things that deep can make you weep. The news took me back to lawn picnics and fall leaves preserved in wax, to Ricky Schroeder bracelets and jelly shoes. I thought about the day we first got MTV, corduroy knickers, monkey bars, and playgrounds. Frankly, I was shocked by the enormity of memory in that reserve. I thought of the old willow and the day they cut it down. We all gathered to cry. The children, that is. I wondered, did Sarah still have the coin of willow she saved to make a necklace from in some box of childhood things somewhere? I thought of the time her dad made in an igloo in the front yard and even hung a shop light in it and when he made an ice rink in the yard shaped like Mickey Mouse. The clubhouse where no boys were allowed in on the side of her yard next to a pine tree. I remembered her obsession with Punky Brewster and walking to school on Monday mornings after a new Sunday episode had been on talking about her awesome rebel style. Collecting baby toads in my dad’s cooler. I remembered long summer afternoons of tee-ball in the Smith’s yard and the day I found a compass in the dirt and thought it was a magical instrument not having anyone to tell me otherwise. Years of tennis shoes and fruit roll-ups reminded me just how long childhood felt. How long everything took. Because the journey ahead was so much longer than what we’d experienced, it all felt limitless. In my memory, lots of things are erased and sharp edges are sanded smooth. Things like the fact that I was never invited into her house or to anyone else’s in the neighborhood, for that matter, because my single dad smoked and drank and I had no mom. I was not part of
All of the willows from my childhood are gone now. The one in my own back yard that once supported a tire swing is dead. The one that was in the empty yard between the Abney’s and