In the last two years, I have moved nine times with six different addresses over two states. For two months, I found myself lost in the streets of New Orleans. There was uptown, the Quarter, the Warehouse district, the Faubourg Marine, and the suburbs. Through the eyes of a transplanted but temporary local, New Orleans was an exciting adventure with every day bringing another experience to retell.

Fourth of July weekend was spent with my best friend, Ally, and another college friend. As we left the bar in the Warehouse district, we got lost finding our way back to the French Quarter, where we parked as far away from the Warehouse district as possible. With blisters on Ally’s feet, we stopped at Café du Monde at the halfway point. Drinking our chickaree coffee and eating our beignets, we thought we were never going to get back to our car, much less where we were sleeping. Despite the blisters, the walk, the generic bar, the laughter that flooded the desolate streets still haunts me, as if the laughter of the dead cemeteries rang with us that night.

New Orleans is a place of a haunting. The antebellum mansions, the cemeteries every few blocks, or the voodoo that litters the streets of the French Quarter like so many tourist traps; you are never more than a block from history. The city breathes the slave trade and Andrew Jackson, decades after both of their deaths. Whether riding the streetcar on St. Charles past houses that have been there since before the city or passing time in a coffee shop opened while you were there, you inhale the city past and present without judgment or celebration. To ignore is to forget, which the city’s inhabitants are reluctant to do. Everyone knows something, even if everyone knows it. There is art, life, movement, and beauty in the dirtiest crevices of the city.

Now that dirt has washed away. The city is covered in water, and no one knows when it will be evacuated. The bodies of the dead remain unburied; the bodies of the living are still uncertain as to when they can go home or if they have homes. To think of a city engulfed by history, now by water, confuses me, especially since newscaster[s] act [as] i[f] the city is dead, when perhaps it just needed time for cleansing and healing. The city has not forgotten the sieges and the wars and also reemerges stronger, healthier, and more beautiful, daring nature to fight with it again.

While the houses and landmarks are forever altered, our histories of the city have been added to. Much like Gloria Gaynor, it will survive, and so will its people. I raise a glass to the city that haunts my memories still. The ability to forget you is not even succeeded by death. You will rise, again, stronger, more capable, and more beautiful. We merely await your rebirth from hibernation.

Brett Currier