the storm

“Don’t you just love those long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour - but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands - and who knows what to do with it?””

— Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

No, not really.

Long rainy afternoons in New Orleans do feel like a little piece of eternity dropping into your hands, but there is absolutely nothing to love about them. Today, June eleventh, marks the fourth time in three weeks that I’ve been completely drenched by a sudden downpour!

When it rains in New Orleans, an impenetrable mass of cloud first gathers in the sky. The extending pillow of darkness asphyxiates the streets, leaving the air moist, dense, and sticky. A flash of lighting seals your fate, and consequent booms of thunder crushes all hopes of safe escape. Water rolls down in strands and panels that shift and billow like a sheer white curtain tousled by the wind. Palm trees guarding the streetcar rails fold forwards and backwards.

It was under such a setting that Serina and I left Café Beignet on Canal Street, convincing ourselves that the storm was easing up: a dreadful case of wishful thinking. What is usually an easy stroll back to our hotel was in fact an almost insurmountable quest. Our umbrellas betrayed us, their metal frames twisting and inverting as if possessed by the wind. They felt less like shields and more like sails, dragging us backwards rather than protecting us. Tired of wrestling the umbrellas forward and afraid of being lifted off the ground, we finally closed them, choosing instead to push forward bare into the storm. Pellets of rain now stung at our exposed faces and arms. The wind hurled water into us with such force that I couldn’t open my eyes, and I had to brace myself against the buildings just to stay upright. This was a typical man-vs-nature struggle and we were at an embarrassing loss. Puddles of water had grown into swollen streams, creeping above my ankles, and I was forced to take off my flip-flops and walk barefoot, hoping that I wouldn't fall victim to some obscure skin disease. My clothes were cold and chafed uncomfortably against my arms and legs with every step. Along the way, we stopped regularly, ducking into whatever hotels would let us in, giving each other quick pep talks in the freezing air conditioning before plunging back into the tempest.

When I finally got back to the hotel, I immediately called my parents.

“Yeah, I don’t think I would ever want to live in New Orleans anymore. The weather here is just… too much.”

Over the past month, I’ve often joked with my parents that I’d love to move to New Orleans. From the buttery sound of jazz spilling out of Preservation Hall to the creamy scent of pralines wafting from Aunt Sally’s, the city feels filled with magic and wonder. Some of my favorite memories were the quiet moments – taking slow walks through the French Quarter on languid evenings after dinner, or riding the streetcar down St. Charles Avenue before wandering through the antique shops on Magazine Street. In these moments, the air was soft and sweet. An occasional breeze would run and disappear down the live oak lined boulevard.

But, as I came to realize, life here isn’t just made of happy times and sunny days. As much as I like to imagine living in New Orleans, the reality is that many people don’t have the privilege of seeing only the beautiful parts. Natural disasters are an inevitable part of life.

Louisiana has been historically ravaged by storms and hurricanes, its communities forced time and again to pick up the broken pieces. The incomplete skeletons of beach houses on Grand Isle still stand as quiet witnesses, telling the same stories echoed by forgotten shells of homes in New Orleans East. At the Katrina and Beyond exhibit in the Presbytère, countless lives and stories are distilled into numbers and short paragraphs. They attempt, yet never fully succeed, to capture the true scale of devastation. There’s just no adequate way to express the horror each person endured nor the collective trauma carried by an entire city.

The aftermath of the hurricane hurt each person differently. During the Creole cooking class, our instructor, Chef Maria, spoke candidly about how her culinary journey was shaped, and nearly derailed, by Hurricane Katrina. “I remember that exact moment,” she recalled, “when they told me that the levee broke.” Water flooded Maria’s New Orleans restaurant and left it in irreparable ruins.

Yet, Maria’s story is ultimately one of resilience and hope. Her life is as flavored as her cooking, buttered with all sorts of adventures. Hurricane Katrina was not the end. After the storm, Maria moved to California, taking on new roles as a cooking instructor and private chef for vacation homes. She spoke of building new connections with clients and sharing her love for food wherever she went. She told us stories about working with celebrities, joking about their quirks and personalities. She eagerly explained the origins of various dishes: how the spices in gumbo were originally used to mask the smell and taste of aging ingredients, and how barbeque shrimp contains no barbeque at all – born instead from two tired chefs improvising with leftover shrimp, determined not to waste any food after a busy day.

In the warm glow of the yellow room, we watched as Maria cooked dish after dish, transforming ordinary ingredients into meals that filled the air with deliciously irresistible aromas. Generous chunks of butter. Whole bowls of sugar. Pan-fulls of oil. Each dish was filled with bountiful amounts of unhealthy ingredients that I couldn’t dare to eat even in a week. Maria’s cooking isn’t about making a healthy, sanitized Los Angeles-approved health meal that I was used to. There’s a certain sense of comfort in her cooking that no salad can provide.

Maria’s story is just one example. In New Orleans, there had been so many instances through which I was able to see the way that people triumphed over hardship by pushing through courageously, sometimes creating beautiful things in the process. They have shown me that deviating from the linear line that you want your life to take on isn’t necessarily the end of the world. I saw defiance against the crushing effects of the storm, a sense of hope and a refusal to lose. Resilience is everywhere – from the books we read to the lives of those we encounter.

Life isn’t all sunny days and happy memories; that’s just a fact. Sometimes, it’s about pushing through the storm and carrying its memory with you, so that when you see someone else caught in it, you’ll know how to help.

A Theory of Resolvable Conflicts

“Up the levee. Five miles, ten miles, fifteen miles. Winter or summer. I went with him one Christmas morning I remember. Mile after mile and all of it just the same. Same old brown levee in front, brown river on one side, brown fields on the other.””

— Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

I have a theory that human beings have a tendency towards conflict – that without a manageable quantity of conflict, life would never feel complete.

Here is a graph that illustrates my theory, where the optimal amount of happiness-maximizing conflict is not zero:

Many instances of human behavior and preferences seem to illustrate this theory – our absorption in a thrilling action movie, our love for adrenaline-pumping roller coasters, or even our passion for watching competitive sports. These activities tap into an instinctive, primitive part of the brain. They offer an escape – an electric jolt of excitement that the monotonous drone of modern life fails to provide. Yet in all of these experiences, safety is assured. We know that none of these moments of stress are truly permanent or, in another sense, truly real. The pain and conflict they evoke are temporary and contained, superficial and governable.

Solvable conflicts hence give life meaning. I call this my Theory of Resolvable Conflicts: conflict reveals to us the beautiful fragility underscoring life itself. Controlled instances of pain stand out like neon paint on the white piece of cloth that is our boring lives, and this juxtaposition makes us realize that we are alive. There is no better feeling than feeling alive, and as such, we hunger for resolvable conflict.

The book we’ve been reading this week, The Moviegoer, perfectly captures my theory in action. The novel follows the journey of Binx Bolling, a 1960s New Orleans stockbroker, as he embarks on a search for life’s meaning. This quest draws him into a variety of pursuits – from engaging in fleeting love affairs to seeking excitement in films. Binx describes his search as “what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life,” a desire to “be onto something” beyond the mundane. In many ways, his yearning for meaning drives him to seek experiences that disrupt the monotony of daily life. His search, in essence, encapsulates the hunger for resolvable conflict that I am describing.

In my own life, too, I seek resolvable conflict through running. Growing up, I loathed the exercise. I hated the feeling of sweat running down the sides of my face and seeping into my clothes and hair. I hated the feeling of dragging my feet with every step as I embarrassingly stomped down the streets like an elephant. At some point, though, my relationship with running changed. I could still feel my heart pounding with exhaustion when I ran, and I could still feel my body burning with heat as my breath shortened – yet I came to love running for the way it made me, and everything around me, feel so real. Running emerged to me as a point of collision between a search for profound meaning and an embrace of the ordinary.

In fact, running is so mundane that it transforms the world around you into something that is not. When I run, the scenery starts to roll past me like rear projection in an old movie, as a car breezes past a whimsical backdrop. The cypress trees blend into a giant mass of green, and the Mississippi River blurs into a smooth surface as I cruise down the riverbank.

Running amplifies the sensations of life. I feel as if my life is not my own but that I am looking at what it could’ve been if everything had been a movie. The director has purposely chosen to film this shot from the point of view of the character that is me, bringing organic movements and unstable shakes to the camera to accentuate this subjectivity of experience. Even the sound quality seems enhanced. The humdrum nature of the run itself and the growing fatigue crawling up my body force me to turn my attention to all the people and all the things around and beyond me. I can see sheepish teenagers reluctantly taking a photo of their excited, lovey-dovey parents. I can see elderly couples holding massive Styrofoam boxes filled with aromatic shrimp po-boys and gumbo. I can hear the loud honk of the steamboats and feel their obnoxious flute tunes creep up on my nerves. I can see love locks and Mardi Gras beads clinging to the metal railing of the dock in an eternal embrace.

As I wrap up my runs, moreover, a feeling of invincibility and infinity always washes over me. In these moments, when I am drenched in sweat and my legs hum in soreness like worn-down machinery, I can feel the world brimming with dynamism. Running sharpens my senses and makes me acutely aware of the life that is within and around me. The ground beneath me is solid. The air is palpable with every breath. The glow of the Crescent City Connection casts shifting images onto the dark waters that prance as if they are shivering.

I feel like I can do anything. Nothing can touch me. In the comforting drone of the night, music still rings and lights glitter. After a run, everyday problems seem weightless and powerless. The physical ache lingering from the run stands in stark contrast to daily stressors – homework, essays, job searches, responsibilities – rendering worry about them almost absurd. They become ghostly itches, scratching faintly at the surface of my being, unable to reach my soul or even leave a mark on my body. They are just a background buzz.

The world has returned from a film into reality, in which I am a real person free to make my own choices, intertwined with everything that happens around me and everything that I can feel, touch, and grasp. The world pulses with wonder and life. It is a beautiful enough place just to exist in and walk through, and the possibilities are so endless. Running kind of provides me with a sense of purpose standing parallel to Binx's in the end of The Moviegoer: maybe purpose is found through experiencing the mudane and facing it with courage, maybe its about enjoying a run towards no particular destination, but admiring all the beautiful things and people you are lucky enough to have by your side along the way.

The Gold House

“There was the house we lived in and the house we thought we should live in. There was the house we thought we should live in and the house other people thought we lived in. These houses were colliding.””

— Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

There’s a house in the New Orleans Museum of Art. An actual house.

When you enter the second floor exhibit filled with modern art pieces, you will see it.

It stands 14 feet wide, 14 feet long, and 13 feet tall – a life-size replica of Abraham Lincoln’s childhood log cabin. Its wooden exterior coated in gold, the house gleams warmly under the cold museum light.

Peeking through the opening of the window or entering through the doorway, you’ll see layers and panels of ordinary objects, all rigidly and compactly welded together in thin, neat lines not unlike the stripes of the American flag. The floor is laid with coils of shackles and chains. The fireplace is veneered with bricks of iPhones and iPads. The wall is divided into angular, geometric chunks filled with repeating objects – soda tabs, pills, keyboard keys, metal springs, seed cotton, candy, lightbulbs, telephone cords, railroad tires, corn – all clustering together like pieces of mosaic. The entirety of the house is painted gold, apart from sections of the wall that are constructed with hunks and wedges of black, lusterless coal.

This is Will Ryman’s 2013 sculpture America, a large-scale installation that critically reflects the industries and economies that have shaped the United States. From the brutal institution of slavery which has laid the foundations of this nation to to the gleaming prestige of today’s tech giants, America captures our nation as a glorious crystallization of generations of blood, sweat, and tears. Overwhelmed by the lustrous glow of the house, I found it easy to overlook the individual components composing it. It’s hard to focus on that one seemingly negligible, yet absolutely crucial, question: what has been the true cost of building such a beautiful structure, and by extension, our nation?

To me, this sculpture was a striking synthesis of everything we explored over the past week as we confronted New Orleans’ history of trauma and horror. Faced with the grotesque realities of slavery portrayed in 12 Years a Slave and in our visit to the Whitney Plantation, my prior image of New Orleans as a leisurely city of French delicacies and beautiful art crumbled. Accompanied by Sarah Broom’s words in The Yellow House, which echoed through our travels, I felt my own ignorance laid bare and called out by the very voices I had overlooked: “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, burying them within layers and layers of signifiers, making it impossible to truly get at what is dysfunctional about the city.”

In many ways, we live in America, this gilded house of gold that is both New Orleans and the nation itself. As a young girl growing up in China, my parents and I looked across the Pacific toward this country, imagining it as a land of opportunity and dreams. From afar, we saw a place wrapped in mythologies of glamour, romance, and dazzling opulence: a house that, from the outside, seemed to shine with promise, drawing in those who longed to know what it might be like to live within its walls.

But America’s interior tells an entirely different story. Only those who built its doors, its frames, its walls and ceilings, can speak to the unpresentable scraps and discarded remnants hidden beneath its glittering surface. Only those who live inside can describe the pungent stench of cheap plastic, the gritty scent of coal embedded in its foundation and its walls. The story they tell is solemn, stripped of illusion. No veneer of gold can change this fact.

The French Quarter is a thorny rose dyed red with blood, flourishing atop the bones of unnamed victims buried deep within its elevated ground. In desperation, we tell ourselves that tormented souls haunt the streets at night – as if mystifying their suffering could soften its brutality, and granting them the power to haunt might offer some form of poetic justice.

These terrors from the past gnaw into our present. Like termite holes digging deep into the wood beams of an old cabin, memories and attitudes linger on in the form of mindless “plantation weddings” and tasteless scarf designs of plantations that line the Mississippi River. Again, I was reminded of what Sarah Broom wrote about New Orleans: “The historicized past is everywhere I walk in my daily rituals—to get to the store or to the gym on Rampart Street or to my car to visit with Carl. Historical markers are everywhere you look—underfoot and on buildings.”

Yet through it all, the story of New Orleans is one of resilience. In a world where all seemed lost, courageous African American communities found hope through various forms of art.

Hope is a set of vodou dolls that carry good luck, health, and happiness for family faraway. Hope is a gospel song echoing the words of Exodus, singing of faith and liberation. Hope is a Mardi Gras Indian costume adorned with colorful beads and lively feathers, a valiant expression of identity and heritage. Hope is the sound of a trumpet in a Second Line parade, where laughter rings out and the community gathers.

On the white walls of the museum, a two-line quote by Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu stood out to me: “An artist is a healer. First, they heal themselves, and then they try, bit by bit, to heal others.” Even in the darkest of times, art offers not only solace but also strength – it is not only a means of expression, but a chance to rewrite narratives and shift perspectives. Just like renovations to an old house can transform it into something new, our understanding of the world, our shared home, can also evolve and change with art pieces like America and the Yellow House

I really have faith that art and courage has the power to make the world a better place!

walking through the quarter

“I had a vision of him from long ago, that tall, stately gentleman in the swirling black cape, with his head thrown back, his rich, flawless voice singing the lilting air of the opera from which we’d only just come, his walking stick tapping the cobblestones in time with the music, his large, sparkling eye catching the young woman who stood by, enrapt, so that a smile spread over his face as the song died on his lips; and for one moment, that one moment when his eye met hers, all evil seemed obliterated in that flush of pleasure, that passion for merely being alive.””

— Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

At 9 pm on Friday, I dropped off my roommate Nicole at the Shrek rave.

Zig-zagging between a crowd of Puss-in-Boots and Lord Farquaads, I began to make my way back to the Lafayette hotel. There was something absurdly funny about this scene, and somewhat embarrassing too. I felt incredibly out of place in my plain navy top and boring denim shorts, like I had forgotten to dress up during spirit week of high school. I was a blatant intruder amongst a group of vibrant and distinct characters, all a part of a cohesive narrative that I missed out on.

A while ago, the sun had made its flamboyant exit from the sky. These saturated streaks of yellow, orange, and pink were long gone by now. Golden residue of sunshine lingering from the sunset had gradually receded upwards from the buildings, crawling up brick by brick, to reveal a novel scene. Like dimming lights before a long-anticipated performance, the world darkened and hushed to signal the start of a mesmerizing show – a spectacle of decadence and vivacity that played out on the ornate stage of New Orleans with unwavering flair every night.

In the ashes of the day, a neon phoenix of green, yellow, and purple fluttered to life. The Parisian elegance of the French Quarter died; what came back after a strenuous process of resuscitation was something more congruent to the gilded strip of Las Vegas, a vampire of a city ravenous for anything that shines and moves. New Orleans had arisen from its languid afternoon nap. Pastel-colored townhouses, cottages, and shotgun houses blinked awake, their windows brightening like attentive eyes awaiting every action in the streets below. Streetlights illuminated the pathways, casting spotlights onto the eager faces of each passerby.

I started down Decatur street, a modest alley occasionally disturbed by obnoxious motorcycles whose engines roared loudly and convertibles from which exploded pompous music. The songs would always be either upbeat country or angsty rap, their bassline forcefully pumping down the street and their rhythm pouring into every crevice of the atmosphere. Echoes of the loud music resonated through all the air in the vicinity of the vehicle, remaining in place long after their source had fled the scene.

Most of the cafes and galleries lining the sides of the streets were closed by now, their windows morphing into one-way mirrors. They were survived, or rather succeeded, by little oyster restaurants and quaint bars whose dimly lit interiors nevertheless beckoned at hungry, thirsty, or curious passersby. Affectionate couples strutted with arms sweetly linked like pairs of ducks swimming leisurely in a pond. Middle-aged women trotted forward with their girlfriends on the other side of the road, as if not a day had passed from their college years, when the naive light of girlhood softened all the sharp edges of life and rendered everything into a rosy song that one could not help but dance to.

I soon arrived at the edge of Canal Street. I stood and stared into the shifting waters of traffic. The wide road that extended endlessly onwards resembled a river much more than a canal. Incessant streams of cars whizzed past, their movement forming a current of lights. I could easily envision the scene as a long-exposure photo, the headlights and taillights of each car merging into one continuous line that goes on, and on, and on.

As I kept walking, though, I couldn’t help but feel so alone. Despite all its noise and glamour, New Orleans seemed, to me, an incredibly lonely place. The vulgar posters of barely-dressed women and the crude signs symbolic of different alcohol types on Bourbon Street masked a deep layer of melancholy that spread across the whole city.

Between the cracks of pathways separating clusters of buildings was a tired musician heaving a weighty guitar over his shoulder, soundlessly returning home after a long day of performing. At the other street corner, an old man battled the clamor of sensuous night clubs with the graceful music of his lone saxophone. A homeless man lay on the ground with his dog, basking under glowing signs of strip clubs that promised euphoria and a night of happiness to each passerby. On the curb across from him sat a waitress, smoking a cigarette and staring dully forward at nothing in particular.

In the words of Louis, the somber vampire who recounts his lengthy life in the novel Interview with the Vampire, New Orleans was “a magical and magnificent place” 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”. This was a city of pleasures as much as it was a city calloused by overstimulation. New Orleans at night was a heavily processed meal drenched in an unnameable diversity of seasoning and sauces, such that the natural taste of food had become obscured and completely unsearchable. It was a distracting mass of noises, smells, and attractions that grabbed at your attention with overwhelming strength.

In the morning, the LEMON FRESH truck will wash away the dirt and grime, returning again an appearance of cleanliness to the city. As white bubbling tides of soap flow out from under the truck and crash onto the grey curbs of the sidewalk, the stinging smell of artificial lemon and chemical cleaning solution will replenish the streets. New Orleans will once again be safe, for now, from the multifaceted stench of cigarette smoke, trash, alcohol, and other miscellaneous substances. The cycle will continue day after day, even as tourists leave and return, even as taller buildings and newer car models appear one by one to take over the changing city.

The rest of my walk was a sequence of small alleys; I made my way through the artsy but sleepy Magazine Street and crossed over the more modern Poydras Street, arriving finally at the Lafayette hotel again. The grassy square was quiet. Desi Vega’s Steakhouse emanated its candlelight into the dark night. Inside, fancy customers and sharply dressed servers in black suits shifted around noiselessly like actors in a silent film or puppets in a dollhouse. For now, it was time to sleep. My tired legs begged for the softness of my bed– good night, New Orleans!

evening swim on grand isle

“The foamy wavelets curled up to her white feet, and coiled like serpents about her ankles. She walked out. The water was chill, but she walked on. The water was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long, sweeping stroke. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.”

— Kate Chopin, The Awakening

The lingering embrace of the sun left the beach air buzzing with heat. After a hearty, but over-seasoned, meal of home-made spaghetti bolognese, chicken, and asparagus, we decided to go for a quick swim in the ocean. I watched as my friends, one by one, sprinted into the orange sea, a sparkling mirror image to the static sky painted with unmoving shades of pink and purple. Finally, I made the decision to jump in too!

It was our second full day in Grand Isle, a humble island cradled between the swampy marshlands of Louisiana's southern shore. There was something so foreign yet so familiar about this place; I felt as if we lived inside an Edward Hopper painting. Between bites of gator nuggets and venison tamales, these exotic delicacies which I had to search online to even imagine what they could look like, Grand Isle tugged on the hems of my memory towards the little snippets of Taiwan, my hometown. The palpable heat, the warm ocean, and the sparse blocky houses were all more reminiscent of those hot summer nights on the Baisha Bay than anything I have experienced here in the states, where California’s cold sea water and blue nights instantly banished any remainder of the day, the sun, and the warmth.

There was something procedural in the way that time passed on the island; each day rolled into another predictably like episodes in a TV show, leaving the idle town a crude juxtaposition to the primordial, unchanging shoreline. It seems as though moments can quietly unravel without leaving a mark, and that life can brush past your cheeks so lightly, repeating the same day forever without you ever noticing. I felt like I was stuck in a post-apocalyptic world where the rest of humanity had vanished – taking with them every indicator of change and leaving behind no means of perceiving any real passage of time.

The incessant swaying of waves soon lifted me off of my tip-toes. Swimming, not walking, appeared to be the only way to reach my peers. As I clumsily dog-paddled into the depth, I couldn’t help but think back to our earlier dissection of the Awakening and its disenchanting ending – a tragic scene that takes place right on this very island, in the very ocean that we were swimming in.

In the final scene of the book, Edna, the protagonist, swims out into the horizon and executes one final act of rebellion by committing suicide. As all her terror and exhaustion fades away, Edna swims towards a place with “no beginning and no end”, a place where she can finally be free from the grounding loneliness of everyday life, social responsibilities, and a constant, impenetrable sense of alienation. She leaves behind her family, her lover, and her children. The ocean posed a seductive alternative to everything else – its indomitability, beauty, and unboundedness at once symbols of insurmountable power and of uncurtailed freedom. On such a languid evening like ours, Edna approaches the sea and never returns. This was her choice.

In the distance, flickering waves flattened into an unmoving line. The coral glow of the sun had dulled to a gentle aftertaste now, swallowed by the cavernous night. Street lights blinked like eyes when the waves covered and uncovered them in swift motions.

At that moment, I felt both so powerless yet so free. The water was a giant palm that raised and lowered me with each rounded movement of every tide, the way that a child picks up and puts down her tiny dolls in recreating some epic play-pretend story from the imagination. I tilted my chin up to keep my nose above water, but the waves still hovered closely. That feeling reminded me of trying to fall asleep in a cold, cold room under a thick, heavy blanket. When the blanket was on, you felt the unbearable heat pressing you down into the mattress and drawing out every drop of sweat with its pressing humidity; when the blanket was off, the cool air seeped into your body from the space between your toes and made you shiver helplessly in the glow of the moonlight leaking through the curtains.

At the same time, there was also a sense of comfort underlying the unpredictable oscillating of the waters, like the gentle swing of a hammock on a grassy field. Something pristine glistened under the untameable nature of the ocean – an ancient childlike candidness that only existed in the wilderness, a sincerity that had long been extinguished by the grinding screech of modern city life. The ocean seemed to have a mind of its own – a mind contradictory, indecisive, yet stubbornly swinging like a weighty pendulum. It was at once an object of comfort and an object of terror – like the crawling sense of desperation that “flamed up for an instant” and “sank again” in Edna’s heart. It made you want to stay there forever.

After a while in the waters, my friends and I began to paddle back to shore. Despite the consistent ups and downs of the tide, we safely returned, the sandy ground rising up to meet our feet firmly. The dark blue sky had draped itself over the ocean, and hesitant clouds from the day stayed to indicate their presence, like persistent water stains on a used piece of cloth. The allure of the ocean had now faded into a small whisper of crashing and splashing, as sea foams appeared and disappeared like a flashing grin. As easy as it is to lose yourself in the waves, the shore beams with vitality even on the darkest nights – the plants fluttering with the evening breeze and the yellow flowers illuminated by scattered street lights lining the beach houses. No itching mosquito bite nor the heavy drag of my body through the sand, each grain clinging to my feet with stubborn persistence, can diminish the joy of looking at a sunset, hearing the sound of the waves, or feeling the nice ocean breeze. It was all worth it.

I don’t think Edna made the right choice. I don’t think running away, escape, and abandonment are truly expressions of freedom, courage, and romance. For me, these virtues are much better demonstrated in moving forward despite the swinging tides of life as one pushes towards what they see as beautiful and good. So here’s my choice – to swim back and not just face, but embrace the life that awaits back at the shore.