New Orleans, I Love You

I never knew it was possible to fall in love with a place like you fall in love with a person.

I ended up there randomly. With my college decision due the next day, my mother and I drove from my hometown of Richmond, VA, all the way to New Orleans. 16 hours, nonstop. The trip was a spur-of-the-moment decision and required my grandmother to come stay with my siblings while we went on our adventure. "I don't want you to have any regrets," my mother had said, "so we're going to explore every single option." We didn't have money to break up the trip and stay at a hotel, so we showed up to the city in the same clothes we left in, bleary eyed but excited.

It took me fifteen minutes of walking around the city, among Spanish moss and Creole-style buildings and overwhelming humidity, to decide. A year or so later, my mother would tell me that she knew my decision before I even mustered up the courage to tell her. "I could see it in your eyes," she said. "That city fit you, just like the perfect dress."

I spent the next five years trying to immerse myself in the magic of New Orleans as thoroughly as possible. I rode the streetcar from uptown to downtown and back, making up poems about the other passengers. A man balancing a poboy in his lap. A woman with a backpack overflowing with flowers. A child tasting beignets for the first time, powdered sugar blowing off of their face and into the air with every new bite.

I discovered my favorite restaurants, I floated in the bayou on warm summer days, I watched the piano man at Pat O's play music until 3 in the morning, I stood in front of my favorite pieces of art on warm Frenchmen nights.

I became a better writer there. A better artist, better teacher, better person.

I met my best friends there. I accomplished so many firsts, and I also made so many mistakes. I graduated from college there. I got my first real job there. I fell in love there.

But the thing I need you to know most about New Orleans is that the streets are just as cozy and welcoming as the bed in which you sleep each night. Music bubbles up from them, the smell of food - crawfish and gumbo and jambalaya - swirls around your head as you walk, and the cheers from Saints fans leak under front doors. There is absolutely nothing like that: walking down the street and hearing large handfuls of people erupt in cheers at exactly the same moment, all in their own living rooms. All apart, but somehow still all together.

Those streets are full of wonder, but they're also full of promises. They contain an electrifying feeling of home, like no matter where you choose to fall apart, someone kind will pick up your pieces from in between the cracks in the sidewalk every time.

I try so hard to explain it, that feeling that New Orleans gives me. My family doesn't see it the same way. "It's so dirty and hot," my mother says. "And what about the partying?"

I spend too many hours attempting to explain the allure of the place. That only the touristy spots are dirty. That it may be hot in the summer, but the winter and fall and spring more than make up for it. That Mardi Gras is more than beads and alcohol. It's catching stuffed animals and giving them to the kids on ladders behind you. It's grilling lunch on the neutral ground and sharing with everyone who walks by. It's dancing in the streets with strangers. It's a communal feeling, not just an event.

John Goodman said, "Someone suggested that there's an incomplete part of our chromosomes that gets repaired or found when we hit New Orleans. Some of us just belong here."

If you haven't been yet, go quick. Don't wait. I bet you'll belong there, too.