Katie Flynn
July 2023
I was born with an urge to move south, triggered every winter by the heartland painted white. White is pure. White is the color of a bride, and of a funeral shroud. Of sheet ghosts with holes for eyes. It's the color of new beginnings, which come from endings. I don't know which scares me more; going in, or getting out. I prefer to be smack dab in the middle of everything, with the exception of the place that raised me. Ohio isn't somewhere people dream of living. l I hate being sandwiched in between two coasts, pretending lakes are oceans and getting lost in cornfields for the sake of being alone in a way that feels good. Last month, I caught myself hoping that aliens would leave a crop circle in our backyard. Beyond where green grass turns to rows of harvest to come, where I've spent whole days which add up into years so quickly. I had never left the state for more than a week.
Contrary to my neighbors' hometown pride, I've grown embarrassed of the smallness of the world I inhibit. Unease over my American Gothic has turned to fear, of empty highways and gas stations haunted by lonely truckers trying to sleep beneath flickering lights. Pretending there's a woman in the seat next to them, and that they're driving somewhere good. Even the early autumn bonfires of my recently relinquished youth have ceased to warm me. Now they feel more like sacrifices, bargaining with the devil for abundance to carry us through the winter. I've dealt with the devil in my own way, acknowledging at every possible moment that he was once an angel. He just wasn't very good at it. Neither am I/
Twenty-two years after falling to earth, I'm struggling for air. Not to breathe, but to keep myself lit. Desperation for escape has sent memories bursting from my chest, cracking my ribcage open for flowers to bloom from my heart like a parasite from outer space. Some monsters only want to be seen. So I've flown south, and I don't know if I'll come back. I don't know if I still have a home. My mother is a lighthouse in the dark, but New Orleans is blinding. I want to be blinded. I wanted to be seen, and now that I have been, I can't go back into hiding.
My mother didn't want me wandering Bourbon Street alone in the early morning. This is what she told me, as if she knew what it was like, not only the danger by the shape and probability of it. I promised to be careful. But sometimes caution is more dangerous than throwing it to the wind. The air is swollen down here. It's warm, not like a temperate Midwestern summer, but a steam room. Like the inside of a mouth with too many teeth. I left with one carryon suitcase, no purse. Money tucked into my pocket with an unused passport. I needed it to imagine I was landing in another country. Then comes the horror and ecstasy at arriving, unexpected, in another world. Beginning in a flower shop, which was once a voodoo store. When the cashier told me this, I said I wished I had a voodoo doll of myself, without explaining why. To force myself to choose risk over resignation sounded grandiose.
Behind me, the only other customer laughed. Peonies in hand, I turn to face him. Our first moments together exist only in the present tense. Like a legend, told time and time again until it becomes part of history, which repeats itself long after the heroes have died. It wasn't love at first sight. Love at first sight is too sought after to be real. But I wanted him so much I felt the ground split beneath my feet. Yielding to me, and swallowing me whole. I've made peace with being consumed. I've been driven crazy by the crown jewel of the Delta, which exists fully embodied in a man, just as a man is (supposedly) made in the image of God. my mother wants me back, but it doesn't feel like the right season for return. I want him. He's half devil and half tragedy, and I love him.
We spent the first night in a dive two blocks and a world away from the French Quarter. Where tourists fear to tread. But the underworld never felt scary to me, It felt like somewhere I could live, and I told him this as he carried me back to my hotel before sunrise. He placed me in my bed, and slept in it with me. We didn't touch until morning, at which point he undressed me, and I still felt naked at the continental breakfast. I never felt pretty beneath my clothes until he took them off and looked at me for a full minute without saying a thing. My eyes are blue. His are black. Together we're a bruise. Darkness is defined by light, and the underworld is only the underworld if there's a life on top of it. He's two things at once, and so am I. He's medicine, and a street drug of unknown purity. No suggestion of violence in his eyes, but plenty of potential for destruction, which is also potential for rebirth.
My mother called a few days ago, calling me home. I had planned on ten days in Louisiana, and rescheduled every new flight home I booked. I told her I could afford to stay. I told her I was falling in love, and she said love shouldn't leave anybody mourning. She said I had been swallowed up. Come home, she pleaded. The snow is starting to melt. I changed my mind. I have been swallowed up. A Priest once told me that heaven isn't a place, but a change in state of being. It's an embrace that breaks you down. I don't know if I'll go home. I don't know if I can. But I know I like being enveloped. I wished for him on flowers, stars, eyelashes so many times without knowing it, and I know I want to stay like this. To be surrounded by love, and let it soak me to the home until it's all I am.
I cancelled another flight this morning, and this time I didn't reschedule. I've checked out of my hotel. I've moved into his life and his home, which means I've eaten the pomegranate seeds, which means no going back. Today I saw a flyer with the face of a lost child. A lost little girl, last seen a month before. I started to cry. Hope of recovering the missing isn't only hope, but lack of closure. And I miss my mother, but if I go home, I'll miss myself more. Hurricane season is ending. When summer comes, I'll take a trip north. It will be a vacation. It will be a brief reckoning, to be repeated many times over when the heat down here becomes oppressive.
I've sent him off to our flower shop with instructions to surprise me with whatever reminds him of me. Something that feels like a promise of spring, made every night beneath Egyptian cotton. When he gets home, I'll ask him to come to Ohio with me next summer, to make sure that I don't stay. When June rolls around, I expect the hometown bonfires will stop feeling like a mundane manifestation of the occult. I'm no longer afraid of being burnt. If anything, they'll remind me I was never meant to live up there, and that I'll never get lost in the cornfield again.
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