8:56 p.m. - 2002-02-28
New Orleans
I had a disturbing dream tonight. I was in New Orleans, in a courtyard that was my home, and I was trying desperately to tell someone who was once a close friend of mine that I loved her but she wasn't listening."Why can't you hear me?" I screamed. "Even the ghosts can hear me!" I woke up and realised that I haven't seen this woman for years and the last time I saw her we had an argument about a small amount of money she had borrowed from me, literally five dollars or so.
I have a lot of dreams that are set in New Orleans. It's one of the few places on this earth where I feel that I belong, that I fit in somehow. As morbid as it sounds, I feel like New Orleans has been dead for many years, and what we see is actually just its beautiful ghost. When I go to bed there, I expect to wake up in the morning to find that it has disappeared and I am lying on the remnants of a cobblestone street in my nightgown. There is something very unearthly there.
Not all of it is dear to me. There are parts of it that are so pathetic - all the Bourbon Street revelers trying so hard to have fun when really I think they are just trying to escape their out of control children and their spouses who are having affairs and their bosses who are abusive and all the bills that are not getting paid because they are having the big vacation on Bourbon Street and drinking too many Hurricanes and asking woman they've never seen before to haul up their shirts and show off their tits.
And the last time we went there I saw two people on a balcony in the lower Garden District who have continued to haunt me. They were as close to wraiths as I have ever seen. They were so thin and worn, and the woman had no teeth. They felt to me like two people who had not a scrap of anything to call their own, who gave up any shred of hope years ago and who now lived, not day to day or minute to minute or hand to mouth, but just in a sort of slow, extended terrible limboesque dream...
And all the buildings are slowly returning to the earth from whence they came, strangled by wisteria and Jackson vine and the roots of all those banana trees. But this part of New Orleans is what I love the best. Wisteria vines as big around as my waist. Whew. I got on the computer tonight to talk about Bruce and I's funny science discussion, but this dream is really bothering me. Maybe tomorrow I'll be in a more humourous mood.
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