New Orleans. Mid-descent to Los Angeles, sinking through the layer of smog to reveal houses swimming in asphalt below us, it seemed as though we had been gone for a year instead of four days at Jazz Fest.

New Orleans is a city I loved entire before I ever walked its pot-holed streets, but for the first 27 years of my life, I was ignorant of its existence. The friends I knew who had ventured to the Crescent City returned with tales of oppressive humidity which far outweighed any of its considerable charms.

Just before April 2003, Taylor Hackford was ready to shoot his magnum opus based on the life of Ray Charles in New Orleans, and my boyfriend Anthony was hired for the job. He had found an apartment in the Garden District when I finished the job I had been working on. Ever the traveler, I made plans to escape the insanity of the film industry by hiding out for a month in his apartment at the intersection of Coliseum and Louisiana, dreaming awake in a place I’d never been before.  

Love descended suddenly. The muggy air was an anchor; the heat beat down. There’s a saying in Italy that to truly love, you must fall in love with a person’s faults. The heat was as enchanting as it was oppressive.

One moment I wouldn’t have noticed if New Orleans had been swallowed by a hurricane, while the next found me shaping my life around its tendrils and vines. As New Orleans resident Andrei Codrescu writes in a piece entitled “Secrets” in Zombification, one of his collections of essays written for NPR, “[T]he fact is that we all know that there exists in the world an order different from that in which we pass our days.”

Perhaps some of the transfixing beauty of New Orleans lies in its distance from the stress of life in Los Angeles. In its awareness of its own identity; in its seductive determination to watch the rat race from afar, without designs to follow the trend of velocity.