Saltwater Empire

My ex upstairs neighbor graciously sent us pictures this morning of some of the wreckage of her apartment and of the building in general which the insurance inspector took. I looked at the first three. I haven’t been able to bring myself to look at the remainder of them yet. The ones I saw are haunting enough.

This week has involved a lot of random crying at weird moments. A majority of the time I still feel dazed and paralyzed, like I was for most of last week, but sometimes I feel so fucking depressed that it takes all of the energy in me just to lift my head out of my hands. Not that there aren’t wonderful things happening all around me – there are. Sometimes I feel warm and loved, giddy even. I've been the beneficiary of some incredible acts of kindness during the past week. And I so very much appreciate all of the laughter that various folks have brought into my world recently with your calls, texts, drop-bys, emails, Facebook links, ridiculous stripper dances, etc. Don't stop :) It’s all just very fleeting because the reality of the situation never abates.

It has been almost exactly four years since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, killing nearly 2,000 people and displacing hundreds of thousands. I have been thinking about that event a lot lately. Compared to Katrina, the Castle Apartments disaster is nothing (at least one cat killed, 30 humans and a number of cats displaced). How fast did the news cycle on Katrina last? Maybe a month? I guess I should feel lucky that our little disaster even received two weeks of attention. To this day, I'm sure those hundreds of thousands who had to evacuate and abandon their homes are still grieving.



I am so grateful to draw from the support from my family, friends, and community. Without you all, I would be completely rudderless. <3

Before the Fire/After the Fire

It has been nearly two weeks since the fire at 1410 Central consumed nearly all of my worldly possessions. It didn’t take long for me to recognize that I was using these linguistic qualifiers on many of my sentences. It’s as if my mind is trying to mentally orient itself around that one stable fact while everything else swirls around. And while everything else in nearly every aspect of my life is swirling, I have the fire to ground me in space and time.

Before the fire, I didn’t have much trouble eating or sleeping. Before the fire, I was trying to lose ten pounds. Before the fire, I didn’t realize how many friends I really had (some of whom I had never even really met yet). Before the fire, I hadn’t cried in a very long time. After the fire, I feel like I have some sort of super-ADD. After the fire, it feels like I get things accomplished at about a one-third pace (or slower). After the fire, the times that I have been able to temporarily put worrisome thoughts out of my mind are brief and fleeting. After the fire, I’m thankful to know that people still think of me as the giggly one.

I know that this event is changing my life. I know that it is probably shaping my future in strange ways that I could never predict at this point. I’m trying to embrace that change with as much grace as I can. It’s very slow-going.