Regina Carter, I'm Coming Home

These few days I found myself driving and recognising a city that will always be mine. I wish I could hug it and give it a kiss back. It totally deserves it. This city is giving, smiling and (though a bit cold now) always warm. (I told this to a friend and he put it better, New Orleans is like the sweet, fat, and sweaty hug from your aunt that immobilises and buries underneath her layers of love).

This might be the reason why more people are moving to New Orleans and the landscape changing so much. As soon as I start feeling melancholic about something I knew so well, I get distracted by something that wasn't there before. Then I get curious and excited and totally forget about that thing I was feeling in the first place.

This also accounts for good friends too. Most of them are doing their thing, and though at first I felt sad, I now understand this can also change too, some of them can become memories of the past. Which completely sets free any expectations I might have about them. And then again, I keep finding sources of love that haven't moved one inch back, they're home to me and they'll remain that way, I hope, for long.

I wonder how neworleanians are feeling about this. Their landscape changing so fast and so furiously. New food, new people, art centers changing management, some galleries becoming museums... Exciting but what happens when rich people buy two or three plots of land and demolish pieces of architecture that are the essence of New Orleans?

Gentrification was an issue when I lived here but it was not evident then. I saw people shedding tears around it and I have felt the same way with some stupid projects being built over prehispanic vestiges in my country.

In a way I feel free. Free to come back if I wanted to, free to explore other opportunities. I have to come to understand a lot of the things that happened here. And all I can say, is, or repeat from someone saying is: "Sometimes you need an event... A pole in the water to bend the way of the flow.

Yet, I have this weird feeling that this trip made a pile of ashes and as I blew them apart, glitter went flying by. One more of life's magical and brief dreams.