How did I get here?

I can hardly believe I once saw New Orleans gilded with gold. The surface melts away, melts away. I literally felt as if my eyeballs were being ripped apart by a fork, zig-zagging and pulling down and out of my head. The inanity of it all. Freshman college life in the Big Easy. Who could've imagined a more perfectly raucous and all tomfoolery forgiven place to sign your soul away to beer, drugs, sex, "freedom?"

I'm resisting it all, feeling crushed, mutilated, insignificant, lost.

I crave something deeper. I truly believe that I just want to love. I want to love the place I'm in, to smile at the girls walking down to the community hall bathroom. No such love allowed within the bitchiness hierarchy etched in the female bones at the beginning of time. I want to love our football team, to cheer them on no matter how many field goals attempted and failed, no matter if the most exciting parts are just getting a "First down... Tulane!" No such love with the deadened dreary faces, sitting frames slumped into stadium seats... just me and my precious roommate standing up. If I sit down, I give up on them. And the students just don't care. I want to love the city I'm in- all her charms and gumbo of personalities and talent. But all the freshman class seems to pin to their chests and mouths are the cups and bottles and glasses of alcohol and stickering about five bars each night, every night. I want to love so badly...

Perhaps the only way I can love here, right now is by forgiving them all. I've turned my eyes and throat to God, asking him why I'm here, why didn't I fly away from here when I've cursed the chains I've had on me in my home since I was about eight years old. It was because I wanted to love. But does love have its limits? I don't think so. Wherever I am, I can love.

Let me love!

Lovely Lane to Nowhere

Just stop me for a moment as I gape at the hurricane's potential landfall and its margin of error.
Remind me again what tomorrow is.
The 29th of August, really? The third anniversary of Katrina?
Really.

How ironic that we need strip our walls of its paintings, hoard our pictures in shoeboxes, pack our lives away...

How ironic that I indulge in freshly-baked, homemade chocolate chip cookies and the lickings of a chocolate cake batter along the bowl and the whisks.

Normality is procrastination. Yes, I'll construct myself a little transparent box of normality through the procrastination of my graphic organizer analysis of Kennedy's speech and my thirty two problems of Calculus homework.

No, I won't forget Regina Spektor's "Loveology," or Coldplay's "Warning Sign."

Hurricane Gustav Survival Kit:
-Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
-U.S. History AP binder, to begin studying for SAT II
-iPod (stocked with Tegan and Sara, Coldplay, Voxtrot, The Shins, M.I.A., and the first episode of Hey! Arnold)
-Seasons 1-3 of The Office
-Nintendo 64 Game Console and Diddy Kong Racing, Mario Kart, Zelda Oricana of Time
-shoebox of sentimentalities
-copies of college application essay questions
-journals/sketch diaries/empty papers and full pens

I'm Sorry, Mr. Apollo 13 Calculus AP-happy-teacher, neither of my Calculus textbooks will make it to the packed-to-the-brim car. My stomach full of baked goods occupies much of the space, and my clashing, swirling thoughts fight for every other cubic millileter of air within the vehichle.

Send me where you may, Lord, that my dreams never die.