Southern Legitimacy Statement: I moved from Nairobi to Nashville right before I started high school and I vowed to leave the South the moment I graduated. I reluctantly stayed in town for college and then went as far away as I could. But Tennessee kept calling me and I slowly made my way back and now I’m here for good. And now I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Katrina, Darling
Everyone way down South has their own Katrina story, Joseph Duke realized at some point long after the memory of the storm faded. He even saw a spate of Katrina themed writing in the literary journals and magazines he read in the following years. The stories on the news looked traumatic, Joe conceded, and he’d hate to be stranded by nature and abandoned by government, wondering if the boundless water would be his end. If he had been far enough South when it happened, he might have his own Katrina story.
In a way he did, though it was not the typical Katrina story. Hurricanes can be deadly for those along the Gulf Coast. For those five hundred miles inland, they can be a welcome relief from summertime heat and drought. Three days of driving rain is better than three days of ninety degrees and humidity so high you wipe the sweat from your body on your pants like you would the salt from movie theater popcorn. Hurricanes are terrible. The inland remnants of hurricanes are more favorable.
Katrina coincided with the end of Joe’s honeymoon, and the two would be forever linked in his mind. He watched Katrina make landfall on the morning show while getting ready for his first day back at work, and then watched on subsequent days as societal order proved itself to be paper thin and things fell apart as quickly as things descend into chaos in countries far less developed than America. We’re all one storm away from the apocalypse, Joe decided. Overnight, one disaster can erase thousands of years of progress. The permanence of civilization is only an illusion we choose to believe because the thought of a world without it frightens us.
And then the rain came north to Tennessee just in time for his first weekend as a married man. The thought he was married still didn’t feel real to him, and it never really did for the three years they were together. But the rain came and they nested in their tiny condo safe under the heavy comforter, arms serpentined around each other and legs twined together in impossible oneness. These were the days before endless streaming and they actually had to get up to change the disc from time to time as they watched the entire first season of Lost in a hypnotized attempt to catch up before the second season soon began. The marriage bed felt safe compared to the rest of the world. I can do this, Joe thought to himself.
But that illusion was only paper thin too. Something happened and things fell apart and even years later he could not look back and point to the moment it all began to go wrong. It didn’t really matter anyway when the first crack appeared or what caused it, not by the end. Soon the fractures would be so momentous their origins would be negligible. The first raindrops of Katrina were irrelevant compared to the flood.
It was all a blur, those years, at least the marriage part of them. Most of the time Joe felt like he was drowning and the only light he could see was through a dark, watery lens. Maybe something had happened to submerge him, but once he was underwater he did little to save himself. Instead of swimming to the light, he dove for new depths. He knew his penchant for self-destruction would lead him nowhere he wanted to be, but somehow he convinced himself it might. In the end, he assumed all the blame because it was easier than the introspection it would have required to find the roots of the flood.
In some ways the divorce was a shame, Joe thought, even if he never lifted a finger to object. It’s not that I wish I was still married to her, he maintained, it’s just that something, somewhere was lost. “I do,” he had said, and he remembered a glowing bride in white and the days or weeks when it all felt like their hearts were together in some safe nest where nothing mattered but the two of them, and somehow even the wild world raging around them could not penetrate their safe space. Whether the cracks in that haven came from within or without mattered little once the shell had shattered. The shame was that everything ends, even the good things we think will last forever. The shame was that it fell apart so quickly. We want to think in terms of forever, but entire marriages from the day you meet to the day you whisper “I no longer do” can transpire in three years and change. If someone had told Joe his bride in white would be well on her way to becoming a fading memory in three years, he would have laughed. Such foolish things are not to be believed, he would have thought. And if you had told him that in more years to come, he would barely remember this bride, that even the idea of having been a married man would seem so foreign to him, yet seemingly less important lovers could be remembered as clearly as rewatching films, if you were to tell him this was how memories work, unpredictable and uncontrollable, he would not have believed you. Surely we remember the momentous things the most, he would have thought.
Even storms so fierce their names are retired become distant memories. Katrina stories happened to other people, but even our own stories eventually feel like they happened to someone else. Even our own lives become fables that feel like they must have happened to someone else, or maybe they happened to us, only in another, antediluvian lifetime. And when we remember, we see that all of the beautiful colors have merged to something dark and painful. No matter. We build our levees higher and stronger so nothing can ever hurt us again, and soon even the memory of that pain dissipates. Oh, but Katrina, Joe mourned. My darling, how I remember you. I remember your walls of rain rising around me and creating the last safe space I’d ever have. I remember the sound of you tapping on the roof, the sound of soft smiles, and the last silence I didn’t feel the need to fill. I remember low lights and not knowing day from night, and not caring. I remember moving only in somnambulant slow-motion and thinking this is how pace should be. I remember all colors blending into one. I remember feeling so still, and thinking the tranquil narcosis would never end. Katrina, darling, did your waters come to bring me comfort in a hot summer or did they come to pull me under? For I remember you and yet nothing after.
