Too Much Is Just Enough

I’ve completely overdone it. When I step onto the streetcar I’m instantly met with a variety of odd looks. I may as well have sprouted a third eye.

It’s my first time seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show live in a theater, so I wanted to go all out. I spent nearly an hour in the hotel room excitedly smearing my face with powder and product, swiping electric blue over my eyelids, lining my lips in dark brown, and painting on arching, doll-like eyebrows. But now I’m starting to regret it, feeling silly and clownish as I sit in shameful silence on the streetcar ride to the Prytania Theater. It’s only a fifteen-minute ride, but it feels like hours.

But as my friends and I get off the streetcar and head down Prytania Street, our fellow moviegoers slowly start to trickle in—and it becomes apparent very quickly that we’ve been gravely upstaged. Bare skin is on display everywhere, peeking through fishnets or lingerie; glitter and cheap sequins flash in the dark; teeth and tongues glint against dark rouge lips. I’m embarrassed again, this time because I should have gone even further. I kick myself for leaving my corsets back in California.

Luckily, I forget about this pretty quickly; Rocky Horror is not the kind of movie for reflection or self-consciousness. It’s a movie for dancing, for screaming, for being loudly, obnoxiously naughty—and I can’t think of a more fitting place to enjoy all of its outrageousness than here at the Prytania.

Rocky-inspired makeup

The Prytania

Rocky Horror virgins!

““Ignatius ate his current popcorn and stared raptly at the previews of coming attractions. One of the films looked bad enough, he thought, to bring him back to the Prytania in a few days.””

— John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

The Prytania is famous for being the oldest theater in New Orleans, as well as the theater where Ignatius Reilly, the notorious protagonist of A Confederacy of Dunces, frequently goes to masochistically grumble about the “degenerates” onscreen. Ignatius would be beyond horrified to witness the wickedly delightful ribaldry of Rocky Horror, to see all of these flamboyant, scantily-clad youths gyrating down aisles, flinging rice at each other, howling irreverently—although he might grudgingly agree with their crude assessment of Barry Bostwick (asshole!) and Susan Sarandon (slut!). It’s a spectacle that’s certainly not for the faint of heart, or the faint of valves. But it’s also a spectacle that you just can’t look away from; as Ignatius tells his mother, “We must stay to watch the corruption.”

““When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.””

— John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Me too, Ignatius, me too

Rocky Horror sums up so much of what’s so great and so damning about this city, ridiculous and excessive and overindulgent. It’s my last week in New Orleans, and so I resign myself to indulging all of my vices. Ignatius bumbles through A Confederacy Of Dunces gorging himself at every opportunity, plowing through pastries and steaks and popcorn and hot dogs. Reading the book I laughed at his gluttony, but I’ve become all too familiar with it now—how can you come to New Orleans and not make a pig of yourself?

Almost everything I’ve had to eat here has been both excellent and plentiful. Portion sizes in New Orleans are gargantuan, but I hardly notice because I clean my plate every time. I fret to my sister over the phone about how many pounds I’ve put on, how my waistline must have expanded at least three inches. But in spite of my complaining, I wouldn’t dream of trading in those few pounds for all of the incredible food I’ve gotten to enjoy. If I began to list every delicious thing I’ve eaten on this trip I’d run out of space, but I have to give special praise to the beignets at Cafe Du Monde, and the “All That Jazz” po boy at Verti Marte—a glorious sandwich stuffed with ham, turkey, shrimp, cheese, mushrooms, tomatoes, and Verti Marte’s ‘Wow Sauce’ (accurate to its name!). Ignatius has an infamously insatiable appetite, but I have to imagine that if there was ever a sandwich that could satisfy him, it’d be this one. Possibly more than anything else, I’m going to miss the food here dearly.

““That’s what’s so wonderful about New Orleans. You can masquerade and Mardi Gras all year round if you want to. Really, sometimes the Quarter is like one big costume ball.””

— John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Em and I drinking our blood bags

I’ve fallen in love with this city in all its excessive eccentricity. This is a city where people day-drink and dance through Jackson Square toting enormous, obnoxiously bright green Hand Grenade cocktails. It’s a city where shamelessly drunk idiots stumble down Bourbon Street dangling Mardi Gras beads at women, shouting for them to lift their shirts. It’s a city where people dress up as vampires and witches and everything in between. Ignatius hates the overindulgence that’s all around him, but partakes in it just the same; it’s impossible not to! As I’ve written before in a previous blog, where else? Where else can you drink “blood bags” at vampire-themed bars, gain five pounds off of po boys and beignets, spend entire days strolling aimlessly and gorging all of your senses? Where else, where else, where else?

A very indulgent collection of memories

““Now that Fortuna had saved him from one cycle, where would she spin him now? The new cycle would be so different from anything he had ever known.””

— John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

As my time in New Orleans rapidly dwindles to an end, I’m struck by how fast this month went by. But having spent all of this time indulging myself, I feel satisfied; I feel full, content. I think of Ignatius and Myrna riding off in the car together on the very last page of A Confederacy of Dunces, leaving New Orleans behind, and how Ignatius—perhaps for the first time in the entire novel—is overwhelmed by a profound gratitude. I’m grateful too, for this trip, these people, this remarkable city. Until we meet again in the next cycle.

Ignatius and I, signing off

For The Love Of God, Write!

Only a week left in New Orleans and I haven’t written anything.

Okay, that’s not exactly true—I’ve finished two five-page essays now, and this is my fourth blog post on our site. I’ve journaled nearly every day since getting here, jotting down all my observations of people and places and moments I find interesting. During this trip I’ve put a respectable amount of words on paper, maybe somewhere in the twenty-thousands if I had to estimate. But I haven’t written anything.

Inspiration was never a struggle for me in high school. I saw stories everywhere: in old couples on the street, in peculiar perfume shops, in ads I saw at Costco. Words used to leap out at me. Now I chase them, and when I manage to catch them I have to wrangle them, wrestling them into the right shapes as they bite and kick. It feels like a fight every time, and I’m getting tired.

Logically, I know that there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for my writer’s fatigue. My screenwriting major requires me to write constantly for classes—fifteen pages of a feature due one week, a full act of a television drama due the next, more outlines and ideas than I can count. Logically I know it’s enough consistent output to wring any artist dry of creativity; logically I know that I’ve not completely lost my ability to write books. The problem is that I am not a logical person, and all of my instincts are screaming in terror and clanging alarm bells: I have no inspiration, I’m never going to write again, and the world is ending.

““Not to be onto something is to be in despair.””

— Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Coming to New Orleans, an entirely new environment, I hoped that I’d finally be able to reset my brain, rewire myself and get back to my roots, churning out ideas by the dozens. In The Moviegoer, Binx Bollings is on a relentless pursuit of self-discovery and personal fulfillment, which he calls “the search”. “The search,” Binx declares grandly, “is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.” He describes exactly what I was looking to find in New Orleans—a big Eureka moment, a realization that this is what has been missing from my writing the last few years.

““Everydayness is the enemy. No search is possible.””

— Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

I wanted to escape the everydayness of L.A. and Orange County, the two places that have cradled all twenty years of my life, and to venture deep into swampy, glitzy New Orleans, which has seen the birth of countless literary greats. We stand in Jackson Square and rattle off the names of enormously influential writers who spent years drawing inspiration from this city. Tennessee Williams, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Bukowski—it’s the wet dream of any pretentious, grammar-correcting, scarf-wearing English major.

Faulkner House Books (thank you again to Alice for taking pictures while I’m zoning out)

It makes sense why New Orleans would speak to a writer; this city touches all of the senses. Streetcars rattle past windows. Jazz saunters down streets. Galleries and antique shops and colorful bars pack every corner. And if you’ve had a beignet here, I don’t need to explain that it’s something of a religious experience.

As I walk through Faulkner House Books—William Faulkner’s old home, transformed into a tiny but enchanting little bookshop—I feel overwhelmed by both awe and jealousy, surrounded by pages upon pages of boundless human creativity. These are all real writers, people who were able to channel their surroundings into tangible things, things with spines. When I get back to the hotel I spend an hour staring at an empty Google Doc. Go, brain, go, I chant at myself. Do the thing you’re supposed to do. You’re a writer, for the love of god, write.

I don’t write anything. There are no big flashes of inspiration, no Eureka moments, no brilliant, mind-blowing concept that will become my next book. But in all the time I spend not-writing, I am living, soaking up as much of New Orleans as I can. I try jambalaya, beignets, gumbo, andouille, beignets, shrimp and grits, beignets (have I mentioned how many beignets I’ve eaten?). I stroll down Frenchman Street listening to live jazz bands playing through the twinkling night. I go to the Vampire Apothecary and drink a fluorescent violet elderflower martini, served to me by a fanged waiter, which will later give me a headache that is totally, completely worth it. Really, I think as I sip at yet another iced latte from PJ's, which has quickly become my Business District sanctuary. What's so wrong with everydayness?

Vampire-approved drinks

Nobody judge me for what I’m about to do…

Late night streetcar rides!

““I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.””

— Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

New Orleans is too vibrant and magnificent to waste time in torturing myself over the search—sorry, Binx. I want to explore, not with the intention to find anything, but instead to just experience. Only a week left and I want to use every moment appreciating this city and enjoying myself—who knows when I’ll be back, or when, if ever, I’ll get the chance to do something like this again?

I could spend tonight agonizing over blank pages, wracking my weary brain for an idea that’s worthwhile. I could spend tonight searching, trying to write something; but when I think about it, writing is really all that I’ve done since coming to college. Words and books and inspiration still live in me. Tonight I’m going to a movie with my friends, and I’m going to have a good time.

Everywhere, Ghosts

On our ghost tour, our guide warns us that New Orleans is a haunted city. Ghosts are everywhere, she tells us, roaming throughout the French Quarter, taking up residence in apartments, in old hotels, in alleyways. Her stories are fantastical and sensationalized, the kind of stories you tell after dark holding a flashlight under your chin: stories about jilted lovers, vengeful murders, corpses stuffed away in trunks.

She’s right, to a degree: New Orleans is haunted. But when I think of the ghosts that linger here, I don’t think of any of the tall tales that our tour guide spouted. I don’t think of apparitions through windows or phantoms crawling on ceilings. This is a city haunted by its own dark, treacherous history.

““The historicized past is everywhere I walk in my daily rituals.””

— Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

What used to be a cotton factory in the Business District

In her memoir The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom is all too aware of the inescapable “historicized past” of New Orleans. In previous blog posts I have described how this city has a sort of immortal life; how, walking through the streets, it’s impossible not to look at all of the dated architecture without being instantly transported to times of the past.

But this has a cutting double edge; that past is rooted in racial tensions that stretch all the way back to its foundations. This is glaringly, horrifyingly apparent on our walking tour through the Business District, mere streets away from our hotel. Our walk is brief and short, lasting less than fifteen minutes, but along the way we stop again and again for Andrew to inform us that there was once a slave pen on this corner, and this corner, and this one, and here, too.

I stop counting after the first few, unable to wrap my mind around this. Every day we walk these streets back to our hotel, where we are promised comfort, privacy, beds to sleep on for the next beautiful morning in New Orleans; and, every day, we pass by these sites where people once lived in unthinkable conditions, their humanity stripped from them completely. For the past couple weeks I’ve been reveling in the beauty and the glory of New Orleans’s history, thrilled to report back to my family about all the buildings and places that have been here forever. But this history suddenly takes on its full weight, baring ugly, jagged teeth.

““When a person dies in a place they become the place and nothing is ever the same again.””

— Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

I feel those teeth sinking into me the moment I set foot in the Whitney Plantation. It is deceptively, sickeningly beautiful: ivy grows thick on winding trees, shrubs line brick pathways. Colorful birds skip by, chirping and singing, and I can’t help but think of how wrong it is that birds should sing in a place like this, as if they could know the kinds of horrors that took place here a century ago.

I feel the ghosts here in The Whitney Plantation possibly more than anywhere else. They’re everywhere, making themselves immediately present at the Wall of Honor, which bears the names of hundreds of people who were enslaved on the Whitney. I try to read as many as I can, knowing that I won’t remember them all, and this fact horrifies me.

The Wall of Honor is one of many memorials at the Whitney; the ones that stick and sting in my chest the most are the Slave Revolt Memorial, dedicated to the enslaved individuals who were killed after organizing an uprising on the German Coast of Louisiana, as well as the Field of Angels, dedicated to the thousands of enslaved children who died in St. John the Baptist Parish.

The Wall of Honor

The Slave Revolt Memorial (thank you to Alice for these photos)

These memorials are somber reminders of the past—and reminders don’t feel adequate enough. There are no memorials or reminders or words that feel big enough to capture the pain and the scale and the tragedy of the South’s enslaved history; although we try, we can never fully remember these experiences that we never lived through, and therefore will never fully understand. As I walk through the Whitney, I stop focusing on remembering, and instead I try not to forget.

William Frantz Elementary: one of the first desegregated elementary schools in the Deep South

““The mythology of New Orleans—that it is always the place for a good time; that its citizens are the happiest people alive, willing to smile, dance, cook, and entertain for you; that it is a progressive city open to whimsy and change—can sometimes suffocate the people who live and suffer under the place’s burden.””

— Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

And this is the wild, sad phenomenon of New Orleans: returning to the city, it’s difficult not to forget. Everywhere, people seem so intent on convincing you that this is the place to be, selling stuffed alligators, dancing in parades, playing live jazz throughout the streets. For a city with a history that is so entrenched in shame, there’s a great deal of pride everywhere you go. I wonder if this is almost a way of compensating for all of the tragedy, or maybe more accurately, of coping with it. Sarah Broom puts it into words far better than I can: “Everything was life and death; if you didn’t laugh you could die inside, too.”

I think back to our walk through the Garden District—one of the richer, whiter neighborhoods in New Orleans—where, despite the beauty and elegance and upkeep of the mansions, so many of the sidewalks were uneven, ruptured with oak trees whose wild, stretching roots couldn’t be contained under concrete. New Orleans is a lot like this, I think; all of its beauty is built on the roots of deep trauma and melancholy, and those roots spill out everywhere, erupting through cracks. But the people here go on building—building families and lives and communities, building on top of all of this—building anyway.

New Orleans, In All Its Crooked Glamor

Our venture out of Grand Isle and into New Orleans begins in a swamp.

Cypress trees and wild sprigs of grass rise from muddy water. The world is so green that I start to forget what other colors look like. As we embark down the bayou on our boat, the sun beats down mercilessly on my shoulders, my skin is sticky with sweat and bug spray, gnats bat across my face—and all of it is just wonderful.

““And there were the sounds of the swamp, a chorus of creatures, the cry of the birds.””

— Anne Rice, Interview With The Vampire

In Interview With The Vampire, swamps are an integral part of the locale of New Orleans. They’re a place of mystique and natural beauty; Louis describes them with a sense of awe and reverence, fondly recalling the swamp that lay just beyond his old house. But throughout the story the swamp is also a setting for horror and fear: it’s the place where Louis and Lestat bury the bodies of their victims, as well as the place that Louis and Claudia bury Lestat after they attempt to murder him.

It’s easy to see why Anne Rice felt inspired in a place like this, a place crawling with both life and decay. Our swamp tour is a fitting introduction to what I will discover of New Orleans over the next few days: magnificent in its rich history and geography, withered slightly by its transformation into a tacky tourist trap. Alligators roam the water, tremendous and terrifying beasts with leering, hungry eyes, but they’re fed hot pink marshmallow Peeps. A Croc bobs up and down on a bed of algae, a reminder that this site is overrun by tourists.

At one point, everyone on the boat passes around a baby alligator with a muzzle fastened around its deadly mouth. It’s an incredible experience, getting to hold a creature like this in your hands, to feel the softness and aliveness of its body, the little chest rising and falling with breath. But there’s also some artifice to this, seeing the gator’s mouth glued shut by the muzzle, its limbs rigid and frozen like it’s playing dead. It’s a trade-off: we’re sacrificing integrity for glamor.

““This was New Orleans, a magical and magnificent place to live. In which a vampire, richly dressed and gracefully walking through the pools of light of one gas lamp after another might attract no more notice in the evening than hundreds of other exotic creatures…””

— Anne Rice, Interview With The Vampire

New Orleans, as I come to learn, is built on this dichotomy, this ever changing push-and-pull of crudeness and elegance. Louis describes the city as a “medley of languages and colors”, and walking down the streets it’s impossible not to admire this medley. I think of this when we walk through the Tremé, where every single house is painted a different color and has its own personality.

Where I live, a little suburb in Tustin, California, our neighborhood has regulations to enforce perfect uniformity—I remember a resident being flagged by the HOA for painting their door too dark of a brown. It’s a shame, because there is so much beauty and wonder in the Tremé, where each house stands on its own, expressive and vibrant and unique. Maybe I’ll write to the Tustin HOA once I get back.

Houses in the Treme

““Even when the gas lamps went out and the planes came in and the office buildings crowded the blocks of Canal Street, something irreducible of beauty and romance remained [...] walking now in the starlit streets of the Quarter or the Garden District I am in those times again.””

— Anne Rice, Interview With The Vampire

There’s no place better to observe the vast, marvelous culture of New Orleans than in the French Quarter. All of the architecture is remarkable; I could spend hours in the Quarter just gazing at all of the buildings, soaking in their incredible details, the lattice of the galleries, no texture or pattern or pillar quite the same.

“The moon that rose over New Orleans then still rises,” Louis reflects of the city’s changes throughout his immortal life. This city itself has a certain immortality, too, being a unique time capsule of a place. It’s impossible to walk through the streets without thinking of all the humans who, long before we even came to exist, passed through these same spots, stayed in the same apartments, rested under the same shade.

You can’t walk the streets of New Orleans without hearing music—and even the music varies vastly in both genre and quality. As you pass one corner of Jackson Square, you’re serenaded by a jazz band, and walking up just a little further you’ll find a man blasting AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” on an amp outside of the St. Louis Cathedral (I struggle to think of a worse form of blasphemy). But this is the city boiled down to its truest form: a mix of elegance and tackiness, thriving on pleasure and pain. A medley of languages and colors, for better or worse.

““There was no city in America like New Orleans.””

— Anne Rice, Interview With The Vampire

Lestat’s house!

A recurring thought comes to me as I dreamily drift through my first week in New Orleans: Where else could I find this? Where else could I find such a rich and complex tapestry of culture? Where else could I read a book about vampires and find that the world around me is not so different from the world on the page, dusky and sensuous and bewitching? Where else in the world could I do a swamp tour, a ghost tour, and a voodoo tour all in the span of one week?

I'll close with a scene from our voodoo tour: Madame Cinnamon Black gives us a showy theatrical spiel about the magic of this city, hands us strips of “wishing paper” that are very clearly hand-ripped from plain Inkjet printer paper. To make our wishes come true, we are instructed to wrap our wishing paper around offerings of money, drop them into a plastic tree stump and knock on the plastered wood nine times. I watch other tourists fish rumpled single bills from their wallets and hastily fold them into their wishing paper.

A one-dollar paper wish might seem cheap and flashy and worthless anywhere else—but everyone performs this ritual with such eagerness and reverence, some closing their eyes when they knock on the fake tree, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, praying between each beat of their knuckles. There’s a beautiful kind of desperation here. In spite of their wishes being paper, in spite of the drunkards in the street, in spite of the hokey gift shops, in spite of, in spite of—everybody wants to believe that the magic of New Orleans is real. I think I believe in it too.

A New Sense Of Self

The moment we step foot in Louisiana, I feel out of place. Maybe it’s the weary ache of three sedentary hours on the plane, or the dreadful, exciting anticipation that’s been eating at me for the last week as I’ve prepared for this trip—but I feel a distinct sense of unease taking my first ever steps in the South among so many people who I imagine are coming home.

Louisiana doesn’t wait for us to adjust or take in our surroundings. Immediately we’re buffeted by a relentless wind, whipping my hair over my eyes and forcing me to fight for every step. I can’t help but feel like this is a personal confrontation: this state’s way of telling me that I don’t belong here, pushing me out, turning me around while I have the chance. As I wrestle with the draft I find myself thinking about Dorothy and Toto, swept up in a whirlwind of their own that whisks them far away from home, and I have a feeling we’re not in Los Angeles anymore.

“She wanted to swim out, where no woman had swum before.”

— Kate Chopin, The Awakening

Grand Isle is a vast change from Los Angeles, where the traffic backs up for miles and restaurants are packed into every street corner and everybody is clamoring impatiently to get somewhere. Here, the roads are empty with few signs or traffic lights—I struggle to imagine a car accident happening out here, because there are rarely multiple cars on the road at a time. Fishing boats are as commonplace as trucks in driveways. Everything moves at half-speed; even the fish at The Starfish are completely still in their tank, content to float in place rather than expend any energy swimming around.

With all of this change comes self-reflection, which is inevitably followed by self-doubt. I’ve never been more conscious of my own otherness. In grocery stores I get strange, leery looks from men in camouflage and hunting caps. My mosquito bites balloon to the size of baseballs, a symptom of my own body’s incompatibility with the Southern outdoors. My Tory Burch flip-flops stick in mud and get caught on rocks. The country music on the radio may as well be foreign language. I feel bumbling and awkward and estranged, a stupid bird that’s wandered too far from the nest, and this is where the worry begins to creep in: What am I doing here?

“You are burnt beyond recognition,” Mr. Pontellier tells Edna in the opening chapter of The Awakening. It’s one of the first signs that Edna is undergoing a drastic physical change, which is also beginning to alter her on a deeper level. Edna’s quest for self-discovery reminds me of why I wanted to come on this trip in the first place. I wanted to struggle, to change, to challenge my own recognition of myself. I wanted to discover who I was away from everything that I knew, hoping to peel away all of the superficial layers of comfort and familiarity and uncover who I was at the center. But searching for myself here leaves me feeling alienated and alone.

The Awakening isn’t exactly the best distraction from my thoughts of unrest. It’s a quiet, mundane novel without much flashiness or flair; it gives the reader plenty of space on the page to reflect. Edna’s inner turmoil is so grounded and close to my own that it’s hard to think of anything but my own fears and anxieties while I read about hers. The plot reveals itself slowly, in small moments and details—a risque touch on the arm here, a subtly flirtatious comment there—often so discreet that an antsy, overly anxious reader like myself could easily overlook.

“Sometimes I feel this summer as if I were walking through the green meadow again; idly, aimlessly, unthinking and unguided.”

— Kate Chopin, The Awakening

And so, rebelling against all of my instincts, I force myself to slow down and take my time with The Awakening—and I force myself to slow down and take my time with Grand Isle. Instantly the landscape around me becomes more vivid. It’s the small details I find myself most charmed by: a bird with a peculiar muss of hair pitter-pattering beside our beach towels on tiny, rapid feet. The torpid, sleeping cats at Jo-Bobs (we jokingly debate which is Jo and which is Bob). A house that looks no different from the rest of the houses in town, except that it boasts a sign out front that reads “Office”—I amuse myself by wondering who on earth this home office could be for, maybe a local veterinarian or a dentist.

During my first day at Grand Isle, I was so immediately determined to find answers, desperately and obsessively searching for individuality and a sense of self. Naturally all I could think about were all the ways that I didn’t belong in a state like Louisiana. But slowing down and taking my time to appreciate the slowness of life here, I’m becoming more attuned to the smaller details of this environment. In doing so I feel more welcomed. The wind whipping at my face feels more like a passionate embrace than an attack. And the bugs here must love my blood, with the way they leave kisses everywhere on my skin.

“But when she was there beside the sea, absolutely alone, she cast the unpleasant, pricking garments from her, and for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited her.”

— Kate Chopin, The Awakening

It’s far too early in this trip to say with certainty that I’ve discovered myself here, or that I’ve metamorphosed completely into someone new. But what I have discovered is a sense of unity with my surroundings. In our constant search for individuality and meaning, we personalize the world; we feel that it belongs to us, that every creature within our radius exists to service our own journeys to self-discovery. But the more time I spend here, the more I realize how small my own life in California is, a speck of dust in the history of America, in the world. There’s a lot of comfort in letting go of this, even if only for the few moments when rain mists my legs and the ocean crashes louder than my thoughts. I like to imagine that this is what Edna felt in her final moments, too: the lovely peace of being able to exist as part of a larger whole.