Cafe Hitch-hike

2022-09-29

Juggling of trajectories

Isn’t it always something?

I hastily took the week off work for a reprieve. We also had some active storm activity in the tropics, and I didn’t have a good feeling about it at all. I didn’t panic, but I hit multiple targets with one stone by paying a friend a visit, getting a mental health break (and a bigger one than I thought so far), and evacuating.

My neighbors in my quadrant of the state are without water, electricity and phone service. Their area is kind of uninhabitable and will be for quite some time. Hurricane Ian left a lot of water and quite the destruction across our state. It started in SW FL with the affluent Fort Myers and then exited NE through the very southern culture coast of St. Augustine which was underwater from a storm a few years ago.

If I stayed home, I’d probably feel the shock and heartbreak I felt when my then-neighbor New Orleans got hit with Katrina (the rhetoric and response to the people hit there versus here is as different as night and day, enter my social justice/ politics/ racism/ classism rant here). Maybe I’ll feel it when I get back. Where I live now had been on the edge of Ian, just like where I lived when Katrina hit.

My oh-so-brilliant brother near Tampa was very blase’ about the storm, and I had to thump his head about its seriousness, especially since he lived in a vulnerable area where the storm was supposed to hit land. HIs older, paternal half-sister also was concerned, so I channeled a slice of her fiery temper in my message to him. Our cousin Drew lived through multiple Gulf Coast storms and either he didn’t tell Deebo what could happen, or maybe he did and Deebo didn’t listen. However, at the end, Deebo acknowledged we dodged bullets and was keeping an eye on what the fuck was happening with Tampa Bay (the water left that large body due to the storm’s motion, akin to what happens before a very bad storm surge), and then he didn’t seem so cavalier.

HIs attitude almost echoed our Uncle Joe’s attitude towards— everything, especially as his addictions worsened. I guess Deebo has been having his own recent issues with that, and I wondered if that was messing up his thinking. I can’t tell him what to do, but I gave him a hard message on the power and destruction of storms.

When I was done with the message, the feeling of futility and helplessness I felt about Uncle Joe came back, and I just prayed my brother wouldn’t have a similar end. And gee, what made it better was Uncle Joe died 4 years ago this week.

Then, I got a call from my niece B who informed me that her older sister’s 17 year old boyfriend died of an overdose. The sister, M, had overdosed shortly after her last day of school, and on that same day 3 of her classmates died from overdoses. I felt really nervous about M because she is willful and stubborn, and has been in and out of trouble, all of which was the same as my niece Arielle (unrelated to her) who was killed 3 years ago. Earlier this week, I imagined the next time I’d visit Houston would be for her funeral, and I was mad at myself for that and for having so little faith in M (but then again, maybe it wasn’t so hard to imagine since I already seen that happen with another niece close to the same age).

I told my niece that I wished she didn’t have to see her sister’s OD and then the bf’s death. I can’t believe I had to tell an 11-year old that no one deserves to die from that, and that it’s OK to feel sad or bad for a while after something like that. I even told her those feelings sometimes take their own course and that she didn’t have to push it out of her head (which I’m sure her mother, my sis Princ would had told her).

My niece B told me she thought she saw the boyfriend the night his body was found (and that was what she said: his body was found) and before he died. She said he didn’t say anything, but it was seeing him with water in her eyes or like a dream, except she was awake. Perhaps my niece has medium tendencies. I cried a little inside for my niece, who had to grow up too fast. Through our conversations, I’ve found that her perception for things is on the nose and sadly, seems just too early. Now she sees this.

I finished the OD conversation with, “I love you, always, always, always, Girl.”. The ‘always’ slipped out might had been my tears, for both the sadness and the fear, but also to try to reassure her that she has people (and I) who love her so much no matter what.

I guess this week has been a weird fucking juggling of trajectories. The storm, my nieces, my brother, my uncle…. I’ve seen these things before in different situations but repeated, but their expression was different.

Storms always stir emotions. I wonder what will surface when I get home. It scares me, but I just have to remind myself of what I told my niece when I also said we have to keep going because we still have so much life ahead of us, and that we cannot let our fear stop us from living.

downwind | upstream