Comets in New Orleans

The night my boogeyman died I was walking through the Louisiana rainfall. I was young and had not collected many stories yet so the loss of this meteor that consumed me threw off my orbit. Through my grandfather’s life his palms forged a groove deep and dark within the lives of my family and my last memory of him is sitting in a courtroom at the age of nine. The man that made his way from the woods into my grandmother’s life spun his web quietly and I, a dark haired, brown eyed outlier in an ancestral tree of blond and blue, came plummeting through with a fury. My teen years were spent picking through the rubble and piecing together meaning in the chaos of a planet left shaken. As I grew my focus became sharpened and my hunger for answers, amplified. Twice in the dead of winter I set out with a camera and tape recorder, driving the 697 miles from the nation’s capital to a small town tucked away in the backwoods of Maine with a letter that would never be read. Time moved on and as my Grandfather aged my window of opportunity began to close. I became anxious and hatched a plan to buy the lot of land that Earl’s trailer occupied. It is then, at the age of twenty, this story came to it’s end. Unleashed in the quit of space I was free to roam and stumbled upon a new story that has taken me many different directions with many different faces. When an ending comes before we are ready it opens the door to the strangeness within the world. Without an antagonist to counter, my desire to explore blossomed and my limits grew smaller. Still young but older than before I have realized that sometimes it takes a comet’s collision in order to foster life. This darkness that I was given so many years before has allowed the seeds of my curiosity a place to anchor as my heart carries on, careening from one place to the next. As the sun beats down, find your darkness and continue on. By acknowledging the scars in your life, whatever they may be, you are then free to reach towards the light.