bellaniche

I was looking through some old emails tonight and I stumbled across a love letter from me to my husband. In it I tell him my New Years resolutions. This was 2004 I think.
Anyway, it's the only love letter to him that I have left.
How many thousands of love letters were drowned in this city?
Could any of them have made it to the sea?
Even now, are mermaids reading waterlogged verses and wondering about us?
Could there be strange catfishy mermaids in the Mississippi?
Love letters are very powerful things. I was once in a car accident because the man behind me was too busy reading a love letter to pay attention to driving.
Would you like to read it, my letter?
Alright then,
make of it what you will.

I will visit dead buildings with you.
I will sing, deep in the forest where no one can hear.
no one but you.
I will run with you in a hurricane, soaking wet, wearing an antique gown.
I will scream and let the roaring wind take the sound,
away to forgotten caves, where dead pirates sleep.
I will lose all hope and lie defeated on the cold ground,
only to rise and smile again.
I will try to be your Alice/Bella/Niche
I will only be myself.
I will weave magic with you in a kiss.
I will weave destruction in a breath.
I will rip us both to pieces, if I can.
I will rebuild us a hundred times.
patchwork fairy tales.
waiting to come undone.
I will not forget in my deepest heart of hearts who exactly you are.
I will tell myself that I have no idea who you are.
I will tell myself that I have no idea who I am.
I will stop trying to remember the future.
I will forget what comes next.
I will never like surprises.
I will meet you in my dreams and tell you all my secrets.
You will tell me none of yours.
That is as it should be.
I will surrender and throw it all away, only to gather it up again and
carry it many more miles.
I will look at you and let you see my eyes catch fire.
I will close my eyes and run away.
I will meet you in the forest in the guise of a witch.
I will sell you apples.
I will set you impossible tasks.
The youngest son always gets the goods.
the youngest son always gets the girl.
I will be a ghost who waits for you by the sea.
I will be the siren on the rocks hoping to crash your ship.
I will cry golden tears in your blind eyes,
so that you may see.
I will twine my thorns around your heart until there is no escape.
for either of us.
I will.....
I will......
I will......

That is my letter. We used to write each other poetry with refrigerator magnets. Years ago.
Here is one that he wrote to me, that I still remember.

I smooth a moon goddess' gown through the elaborate symphony of the wind.

I think we are lucky to have these little scraps of beauty. I think maybe not everyone gets love letters or poems.

I wish everyone would. Everyone should get at least one pulse-quickening, heart-breaking, breath-stopping letter from someone they adore.
It should be a universal law.

I'll leave you with one last poem that I wrote once with refrigerator magnets. It's not a love poem, but a fragment of a memory.

Behind the garden wall
after the dream has gone
I still whisper
delirious
madness slips back under my tongue

I have developed insomnia. I'm not sleeping so much these days. I am spending wee hours thinking and reminiscing. I've reread many of Miss Angeliska's journal posts. It is so strange to think of how many functions that I attended, that she wrote about, and yet there is hardly ever a mention of me. I feel like an extra in the movie of my life.
I'll tell you a secret. Sometimes in the middle of the night when I'm awake and no other mouse is stirring, I begin to feel like I am invisible. I begin to doubt my own existence. These are the thoughts you have when you have a bad case of insomnia.
And you think, after the hurricane, why did only one of my New Orleans friends call me. I mean people who I hadn't spoken to in years, old high school friends, distant cousins, and the like, were calling. Yet the people that I saw every day, the ones for whom I held parties , baked amazing birthday cakes, spent my money every day to help support their business, donated my time and energy to various projects, with the exception of one, they couldn't be bothered to return my calls.
Do I sound bitter? Maybe I am a bit.
What to do with this then?
What to think?
There used to be a song to which I knew the words (though I don't remember them all now) I never did know who sang it. It went something like this...
I don't smile anymore
'cause too many smiling faces lie
I don't pray anymore
'cause too many of god's children die
I don't mind anymore
'cause now my mind is wasted on a dream

It's strange how little snippets of things stick with you.
lines from poems or books or songs that repeat in your head until you wonder if you are going a bit crazy.

During the first nightmare days of the hurricane(You know my memory of that time is still a bit hazy)
my brain kept repeating "Here lies Vera, God help us" after I saw the photo.
I would be making coffee and my chattering monkey brain would say "Here lies Vera, God help us"
While doing laundry, walking through the grocery store, eating dinner "Here lies Vera, God help us"

The weird thing is not that my stress-addled brain kept spouting the Vera Mantra, but that now I am living in the house in front of which Vera's body lay for three days. Every day when I leave the house I see the memorial shrine that is built in the park across the street where they finally buried her.
I don't know what that means except that every day I feel like I should put flowers on Vera's shrine.
I haven't yet.

I think this is some sort of post-traumatic-stress-disorder.
Let me just side track a moment to talk about the words post-traumatic-stress-disorder.
When my Grandfather returned from WWII he had Shell Shock. I like that word much better. Have we really made so much progress with our long titles designed to suck the feeling out of the things that they are naming? Henceforth, I shall refer to it as SHELL-SHOCK. So it is written, so it has been decreed!
O.K. back to the point, I know that the whole city, and hundreds of thousands of people now in other cities are Shell Shocked too. I don't think I'm special.

I just wish somebody would bake me a Goddamned gingerbread voodoo doll cookie, or maybe a sacred bleeding heart of Jesus birthday cake. Sometimes it just feels like me doing things for other people with no reciprocation.

I think I need some sleep, then maybe my next post won't be so damn maudlin and melodramatic.

Goodnight

He calls me Alice sometimes. I wonder if he knows that my great-grandmother was named Alice. She's the one who lived in New Orleans in the Teens and worked at Antoine's. But the Alice he means is the other one. THE ALICE. Down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass and all that. God knows I've been down the rabbit hole a bit this year. The whole thing is about madness and freedom and the healing power of chaos. I don't feel very healed. Mardi Gras was lovely,better than I ever remember. But afterward, such a let down. All my friends went back home. I've got such mixed feelings about that. I know that people have to do what they have to do. New Orleans is not for everyone. It was hard even before the storm. Yet and still, I feel betrayed. It makes me sad.
I think people have a skewed sense of what it is to live here now. In most ways it's no worse than before the storm. That's not to say that some things aren't hard as hell to get done, Just that in this city somethings were never that easy. There's no denying that it's changed, but we are making TONS more money now. Hell, Walmart is starting people a 8.50 an hour. And Burger King gives it's employees regular bonuses for agreeing to work here. The apartment situation is a little sketchy. But every week in Gambit I see a few more apartments in the cheap range. It will never be what it was before, but in so many ways that's a good thing.
Someone even told me today that the new owners of Zot'z are making money hand over fist since the storm. When I heard that it was all I could do not to smile and bash my head into the counter top. Instead I just smiled.
I love this city, and I am both proud and happy to be back. But after losing so much already, and struggling to get back here, I find that I am still missing something essential. The sense of community that I had is gone. Most of my closest friends are gone. I know that I'm not alone in this, so many people are left wondering where their friends and neighbors are, and if they are coming back. I don't blame anyone for not coming back here. I just miss them all so terribly. It's a brave new world here now. And I guess I'm just hoping that somehow I can convince some of the people I love to come be a part of it.

I've had a live journal account for about two years now. This is my first post. I guess it is just time.

I lived in New Orleans. In the first weeks after the hurricane, live journal is one of the things that kept me sane. I guess I just couldn't talk about it until now. I really still can't talk about it, not really.

I lived in a magic place, with friends who were straight out of fairyland. We had magical gatherings and strange rituals. We picnicked in the swamp. We danced in the streets. We had bloodbath tea parties and art church. I lived in a community with artists and dreamers. I was home.

I don't know where all of my friends are now. They have scattered to the winds. I've only spoken to a few of them. I miss them.

We went back to New Orleans to find our house ruined, our things in the street, and my wedding ring stolen. Every piece of artwork that my husband and I made is gone. Every poem that I ever wrote is gone. All of my diaries and sketchbook, all of my photos, the better part of twelve years, all gone.

We salvaged a few things. We dealt with toxic mold. We dealt with insane landladies. We dealt with vultures and graverobbers, who were paid by said landladies, to steal, break, and throw on a rubbish heap the sad remains of our home.

Since the hurricane I've wavered between stoicism and raving lunacy. Well, not really, you see I'm living with family that doesn't approve of raving. I feel like a lunatic on the inside but I have to keep up appearances. If I was with my beloved friends I could howl in anguish until all the poison was out of my system.

I'm searching for meaning in senseless things. I want to believe that some good has to come of all this.

I've told myself and others, We were lucky. We evacuated before the storm. We didn't have to go through the hell that some did. We are alive. We didn't lose anyone. All of our friends and family are alive.

I've chanted that like a mantra. I've told myself that I'll be ok, that I'm strong, that we'll get through this and be better people in the end.

That worked until tonight.
Tonight I found out that my mother has cancer. She has three months to live.
I'm mad at God. I'm mad at the universe. I'm mad at myself.
I don't know what to do. I don't seem to have a plan. I don't know how to deal with this.
I'm lost.
I'm broken.
I'm not ok.
I don't think I can do this anymore.
I don't think I'm going to be alright.
I miss my friends.