Originally posted 01.20.2006

Sitting on the 4 train on this mid-January day, I feel I could reach through the pages of this magazine into a New Orleans day, end of April, beginning of May. What year, which one of the last four?

The first was a sweet suspension of responsibility after a solitary road trip the length of a river, minus miles on either end, the Boundary Waters, the Gulf of Mexico. I never quite got my geographical bearings, but discovered lizards sunning midday in the courtyard. Learned how to pronounce Tchoupitoulas. Dragged a toe through the piles of powdered sugar beneath a table at the Café du Monde. Wondered how a place so flat could have such depth.

Or the last time, there as not the girlfriend anymore, but so firmly woven into the fabric of that family of contingents that it maybe didn’t matter. Autonomous as I’d been on that first drive down, but this time running instead, for miles, trusting that all roads lead, eventually, to Esplanade.

I’d been through the grief of the end of that relationship, through the nights of bolstering my empty frame with pillows and saying goodnight to the still air around me. Through the awkward dates with new men, wondering what on earth I could say to someone who hadn’t written a book of Bill Monroe transcriptions.

And now I’m revisiting that grief as he visits it seemingly for the first time. It took a year and a half for the reality to hit him in full. I can’t tell at this point where my own grief is coming from: if it’s new, old, missing him or what we were, for losses preceding that, for my parents, or if it’s just my own meshugas, the way I’m wired.

It took about six months, maybe more, before the sound of a mandolin didn’t make the bridge of my nose ache. There is no way for me to pick apart what happened when that city got washed away—what part empathy, personal loss, ridiculous sentimentality (loving something more than it deserves, L?). And now, I can’t tell what’s left, or if I want any part of it.