title fight

my dear new orleans,

it's a shame we didn't get to know each other better. i was nearby once, out in the boonies a couple hours away from baton rouge, but i was young and couldn't really make a case for visiting on my own. i would have liked to stroll down your streets, sip coffee and eat cajun shrimp right off the boat. i might've taken a ride up the river on the deck of an old paddle boat. and i would have marvelled at the feats of engineering that kept the dark waters at bay for so long.

just last year, the hand of god seemed to keep the hurricanes at bay, sending them off east and west and saving you for four more glorious seasons. you have a short memory; you flicked your fingers at the near misses, shrugged at the numbers, and believed nature incapable of breaching your boundaries. and you told yourself, this city is great. we can beat anything.

but nature is a feisty woman, and she doesn't take to being dismissed. with not even a direct hit, your houses folded up in the current. your children swim for their lives and now the rescue boats have to ignore the floating dead to tend to the living. i want to help you, to save my brothers and sisters from being washed away by the tides, but your greedy basin won't let the waters recede enough to let me in. this is the earth's revenge, a man-made life crumbling under this great power of wind and water that we can never hope to equal. you will hold your head in your hands, and shake with grief, and wonder how this could happen. but you saw it coming. you met it with open eyes. and you will never, never make this mistake again.

don't worry--this is fleeting. the levees will be rebuilt. the rubble will be cleared. we'll find a way to put the walls back up, and the people who call you home will come back to their houses and saxophones and beignets and risk. maybe you'll take from warsaw and build yourself back exactly as you were, replicating photographs and paintings and memories. or maybe you'll stage a reinvention, making yourself better and stronger and more beautiful than ever. either way, you'll be back, having not been gone so long after all, and only one or two generations will remember the pain of losing and then clawing back up to zero.

i'll miss the thought of you, the potential of what you used to be; i'll mourn the loss of a relationship we never got to develop. and when you feel better, when some of the scars have healed and the bandages have come off, i'll be there, waiting to introduce myself.

get well soon.

all my love,
sai