Coming back home for Louis wasn’t a reunion, it wasn’t a joyful meeting or nostalgic reminiscence. New Orleans for Louis was painful and tortured, layered with nostalgia and familiarity. Esplanade raised him in his life as a vampire, like how a mother raises her daughter yet leaves generational pain, intrinsically bonding the two until death. And like many flawed maternal relationships, Louis and his city harbors immense rejection, hurt and a lack of acceptance within familiarity.

The complex relationship Louis has with his home reflects the relationship between humans and location, and how environment acts as a parental force that develops a child’s feelings and thoughts, and how the viewpoint in which they see and interact with the world with. Something as objective as a clapboard suburban house or a brick school building or humidity in the weather becomes deeply subjective, personal and unique to each individual that experiences it. Walking alongside the narrow streets, with the sunlight reaching through the shining oak leaves overhead, lighting up the columns, porches and swirling designs of the wrought-iron fences running across each house, the seemingly impossible and complex co-existence of beauty and pain was personified as we walked into sunset.

What makes Louis’ pain so deeply-rooted and internal is the rejection of who he is. As a vampire, there is no source or place of acceptance because of his identity. And rejection of this caliber that deeply cuts and wounds humans – living beings that are intrinsically and deeply in search of love and acceptance – is at times, unrecoverable and in the least, perpetual. Being the object of such hatred, being told that you simply are not and can not be enough is both the external hatred of someone that becomes internalized. Although Louis didn’t inherit his vampire identity by birth, this identity was yet forced upon him, cursing the rest of his eternity to a life he did not choose. Similarly, those born into any minority, those born with anything societally undesirable do not choose to be unwanted and unloved. They are instead an adaptation, a survivor of everything that has made them as a person a rejection.

Like many New Orleans and Louisiana natives, there is no other city comparable to New York and a seemingly objective location becomes part of the larger collective identity: being a New Yorker. Like the people whose ancestors settled in New Orleans generations ago or those who decide to establish their own families in the city, every person who succumbs to New York City and her bewitching charm become her undying ambassador. But, within her beauty, her whimsy, her candor, her vastness has the ability to harbor immense pain.

At the Central Park carousel, where the vibrantly blooming elm trees tell us spring has arrived, the memories of summer are stained in every color of the racehorses and in each brick of the gazebo. Other than it lying directly across Sheep Meadow and it being the heart of Ella Enchanted’s glorified scenery of the New York City playground, the carousel was also too expensive for my parents to afford. And recognizing the $3.00 burden, a 6-year-old girl took a slice of its weight for herself through her act of disinterest and avoidance of the colorfully racing horses and cheery music. On Main Street, at the crossroads of the flavors and stories of migration and sacrifice character of Flushing, Queens, there were the neglected studio apartments above the restaurants out of their budget where a young mom in a foreign country quietly stayed awake to fight off the cockroaches and ticks every night as a newborn slept beside her. Right in the middle of 91st Street, only a 5-minute walk from Central Park and the notorious park-view apartments of Central Park West, among the green ash and silver maple leaves that sprinkle shade and sunlight along the sidewalk, among the smooth sandstone and weathered brick of the brownstones lining the street, a 13-year-old struggled to don the armor she needed to pass through the glass doors that led to incessant mocking and ostracization for the lack of wealth she was to inherit. In a city that was, to her, tainted with pain but inherently beautiful, in a city of complexities she was incapable of comprehending, to escape seemed to be the only answer for someone who believed that forgetting was the only road to healing.

But after 2,000 miles and two years of distance, after self-transformation and changes in style and appearance, whatever acceptance she yearned for couldn’t be found until returning home. Experiencing confusion as sharp as the pain from a thousand paper cuts, returning to the streets and the trees that nurtured her, it was also the hurt that raised her. Standing in the glowing dusk were the enchanting landscape and collage of shamrock greens and tawny browns that were stained with the tears, guilt and pressure of fulfilling a minority myth and a false dream.

Louis’ reconciliation with his own rejection and his consequent agony starts in his escape from New Orleans and becomes his epiphany in his return. The beauty of New Orleans found in some parts of the Garden District, in its quietly content streets and patches of garden at every turn, is bewitching in the same way New York, San Francisco, Chicago, all of America’s biggest cities are to its lovers and admirers. It’s the acknowledgement of the deep-seated pain that has created its history and all of its admirable, commodified beauty. Out of and in disguise of the foundational role of slavery in the South, of a deeply racial and colorist caste system, of colonialism, New Orleans and the Garden District achieves, through its constant wrestling with hideousness, a reputation of beauty.

At the microscopic, Louis discovers this dichotomy through his own life in relation to New Orleans. It isn’t until his return, until his confrontation with the harsh realities and truths of his vampiric identity that Louis is given the power to fully love and admire the grotesque beauty of what he had always had, of his home.