In which I have an all-too-brief visit with family and revisit my college town…

After spending Tuesday night at my grandparents’ house in Metairie, LA, I hit the road for Macon, Mississippi, the home of my mother’s side of the family. These days, that consists entirely of my uncle and grandmother. My uncle takes care of my grandmother, since her Parkinson’s has gotten worse in recent years. He took her into his house, and her almost-150-year-old house that’s been in my family for a few generations is empty and on the market. I’ve been in that house for the last time. It was one of the last houses in my family that was a constant in my entire life, the house where I spent so many summer vacations and Thanksgivings. It’s also strange to see my uncle and his mother in such a similar position as my mother and I were several years back. (My mother had Multiple Sclerosis, and I was her caretaker, bringing her into my apartment when I was starting college in 2000.)

Upon my return to New Orleans the following day, I had lunch with Brad at a tourist destination restaurant  called Mother’s. After sending D-Day Museum visitors there for years, but never having eaten there myself, I figured it was long overdue. I got a shrimp po’ boy, which was perfectly good, but exceedingly expensive. Then I went to Hammond, LA to see old college friends.

After driving around the city and the campus vividly reliving each detail of the 2001 genesis of my now-defunct relationship and the years she and I lived together in Hammond, I joined Steve and Josh at La Carreta. Emotionally, I feel very, very distant from that period of my life, but while here, I also feel immediately yanked right back into 2001-2003. A very strange feeling, and very difficult to articulate. (Walking around New Orleans and Macon feels the same way. It feels like that part of the past is destroyed, and I’m immersed in a holographic recreation. It’s weird. There’s gotta be a psychological term for this.)

Steve heads up the theatre program and has been my professor, boss, fellow R.E.M. fan, and friend. Josh and his wife Amber were Kat’s and my couple-friends. They just had a baby last year, and they’re in the process of moving to Amber’s hometown in Arkansas. Amber’s already there with the baby, and Josh has stayed behind to sell their house. Their store in downtown Hammond, the Funky Diva, which they opened in 2003 while we lived in the same apartment building together, has closed. One more big chunk of Hammond as I know it is ending. I just spent my last night at Josh & Amber’s house in Louisiana. I hope to visit them in Arkansas some time.

Today, my father and I will pick up my U-Haul, and tonight, I’ll dine with the family. Tomorrow, I’ll load the truck, have a Mother’s Day dinner with the family, and then hit the road Sunday morning.

This has been profoundly unsettling. It’s like I’m walking around a re-creation of my past, with only a few of the same characters, and all the places are still there, but slightly skewed and with new inhabitants. Hammond is not my Hammond anymore. I don’t feel like I really left it; I feel like I went to sleep and missed it. I should endeavor to pay more attention to the present, so in the future, I don’t feel this way about where I am now.

I look back on the past seven years, and now I’m seeing it all unravel and move onto different states of being, and I’m not sure what to think about it. It feels surreal, depressing, and overwhelming. The end of my relationship seems to be the focus for these feelings, since it was the glue that held it all together (for me, anyway). That was pretty much the focus of my life during these years, and now that it’s over, it casts the whole seven years in a different light. There’s nothing outwardly wrong, but I feel like I’m only just now mourning for lives I lived years ago. I look back and think of everything differently, knowing how it’s all ended up. I wish I could leap back and do things differently. These life changes seem to happen in stages, and the loss continues to compound. I’m on the cusp of completely losing any tether to Macon and Hammond other than memories. In life, the only constant is change, as they say.

Well, I’m gonna go listen to Morrissey.