What Happened At The New Wil'Ins?

New Orleans is the girlfriend you can’t keep up with.

She’s a holy trinity of French, Cajun and Creole. Eclectic and electric and awake and always singing. Her voices rumbles like a street car, whispers like a barely-perceptible breeze through boughs of oak and it wails like brass horns during a summer storm.

And she tastes so good.

What is that taste?

It’s like seventeen flavors hitting your tongue at once. Spices fresh arrived from the Silk Road, alien seafood and I don’t know what the hell chicory is but fill up my cup.

But you can’t keep up.

Stay up.

Take it straight up

Turn up.

Wake up the next morning without feeling like you’re gonna throw up.

So you break up.

She isn’t the one who got away.

She didn’t leave. You did.

She stayed. She played. She loved you.

Post-NOLA, life is muted. Is it even really life or is it getting through one day and then, the other and then another?

The Crescent City haunts you. Like the priest in the alleyway who haunts the rain or Julie of Royal Street.

So, you go back.

She hasn’t been waiting. Of course not - life to be lived, not endured.

Besides, she didn’t come to play with you hos. She came to slay, bitch.

Upon your return, she’ll embrace you tight and tell you that she missed you. It’s warm and damp. All drowsy heat and magnolia sweet.

You know you can’t stay. That your time together must be temporary because you aren’t sure if your soul is equipped to survive this much fever dream euphoria.

But that’s OK.