Bourbon Street

I spent New Year’s Eve at a cruisy dive bar near Bourbon Street. At 3:17 a.m., I sent a text saying I had left. I just moved to the French Quarter, and it’s now my ritual to walk up Bourbon before bed. It’s just one street over from where I live. I love the messy joy in those blocks of very drunk, very happy strangers. But for some reason, I crossed Bourbon instead and headed straight home. I had no idea that the truck was barreling down three blocks away at 3:15 a.m. I don’t know what this means, only that my Gayngels did some heavy lifting.

In the coming days, people will try to make sense of this massacre. They’ll build narratives that fit their self-interests and prejudices—finger-pointing, conspiracies, surveillance, choices made out of fear. Terrorism is effective that way.

But Carnival will still kick off on Monday. People will ask how we can gather in crowds so soon, calling us “resilient” in that patronizing, puzzled way they use after hurricanes. We’ll fuse our celebrations with this fear, wrap around it like an oyster makes a pearl out of dirt. New Orleans knows the true narrative: that people may unravel in fear, but we reveal who we really are in joy and grief.

Bourbon street on Mardi Gras day