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Sad and Lonely in NOLA One summer, years ago, I was living in New Orleans, before a quick semester at Tulane, in a house with a stranger, having answered a random online ad. I arrived at "The Evelyn," an enormous, blue house divided into three spacious apartments in June. The weather was muggy. The house was draped with mimosa tree limbs and cracking along the seams. The heavy air sunk into my lungs, the subtle sweet smell of the Mississippi swirling around my nostrils. The house was run-down which meant it fit in perfectly with the New Orleans architecture. Extra-large roaches snuck in and out of holes in the floors. This was life in New Orleans-sticky, sweaty, dilapidated, sultry, infested, weighty, intoxicating. My housemate, I learned was a student at Tulane who worked for the theater department over the summer. For the first month, I rarely saw her. She was always working and I never was. I was always sleeping, in my bed on the couch. For a month I slept, barely ate, didn't work, and never spoke to the perfect stranger I was living with. I was depressed. I could feel the air outside in my lungs-each breath dragged me further down. Sorrow was in the air. I could see a smog of sadness out the window. With nothing to do but think, I thought myself into a serious funk, one which I have never experienced the likes of before or since. I would peer into the streets watching for the depression that lurked on every corner. Honestly, when I first went to New Orleans, I loved it instantly. I moved there for the summer when I was nineteen, the year prior to this one. The moment I took a breath, it was as though I could smell the commiseration. I was mesmerized by decadence and indulgence dripping with the tears and blood of turbulence-racial, economic, spiritual. New Orleans haunted me, and so I returned for another summer The Evelyn was a perfect microcosm of New Orleans. She had grandeur, history-broken scripted tiles on the sidewalk of the house as a name tag. And she was tired, tired after years of college students abusing her rooms a year at a time. The longer I stayed inside the arms of the Evelyn, the heavier my sorrow became. The house protected me from the overwhelming world outside, but she cradled me in my own depression. I became caged by my own mind. I lied on the couch staring at the television some days, too afraid to step outside to get a sandwich from the deli around the corner. I thought about every reaction to my actions on the outside. I became afraid to open my mouth for I would be instantly judged, instantly hated. I was broke and starving, but couldn't do anything to help myself. I was alone in a town where everybody had friends-friends to go out with, friends to keep them from getting speeding tickets. Because New Orleans is so disjointed it is easy to feel alone, foreign even. Lavish homes and ladies who lunch made me feel insecure about what I didn't have while scrawny, hungry men and young black kids dancing in the Quarter with tacks on their shoes made me feel uneasy about what I did have. There was nothing easy about New Orleans-it was harsh. Before the semester began, my roommate's summer job ended and she began to spend more time at home. She began to order food for both of us, to invite me out, and eventually she bought me a ticket to L.A. so I could go home with her for a week. My deep depression broke, but the sad and lonely spirit stayed. I began to indulge in it though. The sadness I felt was something I needed it seemed because after my semester at Tulane I cried as I drove north toward home. I don't remember what it was like to be that depressed and I don't remember how it felt to feel myself emerging from that depression. I clearly remember that I was depressed. I clearly remember the jeans I wore and the couch I slept on. I remembered the thick and heavy of New Orleans-its huge oak trees, their roots pushing up the concrete on the sidewalks. The scraggly, the poor and the rich-for months I could see all of it plainly in my mind. So I went back. Again. Just recently I stayed in New Orleans with two long time friends, one after the other. Days after I arrived, and after my wallet had been stolen from inside a grocery store, I began to feel a strange and enormous amount of anxiety. I had stomach problems-perhaps an ulcer. I began to feel paralyzed. Despite my hopes, I never found a job. Whenever I left the house and saw the New Orleans I hated to love, I felt simultaneously invigorated and stunted. For whatever reasons, I was drawn back to New Orleans. Yet again I rolled like a pig in mud in the thick sorrow of this town. I left New Orleans before I planned to, in order to spare myself the depression I experienced a few years prior. My grandmother told me she like New Orleans because it was a town where somebody could go to do whatever they wanted and not be judged. Perhaps I go down to New Orleans to be depressed. I avoid the bars and brouhaha of Bourbon Street, and walk straight into the dense, splintered, languid air of New Orleans to be sad and lonely.
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