Leave me alone
Yesterday work was crazy until late in the afternoon when a source of mine in New York said hey, why aren’t you at French Quarter Fest and I said I’M TRYING! – it was so gorgeous outside and the forecast was for rain on Saturday. So around 5 I caught a cab to Woldenberg Park and caught the tail end of Algiers Brass Band, and walked over to see Benjy Davis Project (which I like a lot), and then back to Jumpin Johnny Sansone, which was okay, so I walked over to Big Blue Marble where the singer had a good sexy singing voice.
G was perhaps going to meet me later but I was digging being solo, so I walked down to the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen and got a grilled shrimp caesar and propped my swollen foot up to enjoy it and a glass of wine. Two NOPD guys at the table next to me kept trying to engage me in conversation as they ate a big whopping slice of bread pudding with a thick rum sauce on top and a tall guy at the head of another table housing a bunch of pretty drunk people kept trying to make me join the party because I “shouldn’t be sitting alone” – and so I focused on my own thoughts.
My mind flittered between sweet elation of a beautiful day, of having enjoyed music, and as I looked outside the windows into the gloaming I couldn’t help but remember when the LPK restaurant used to be Tortilla Flats and I would sit there with the first love of my life Ken McElroy and he would eat like a center on the Grambling football team (he was 6’8″) and he was nuts, in a very very sexy way. He was always running his hands through his thin blonde hair and laughing deep throaty laughs. He kissed like a house on fire. Wow. I couldn’t stop thinking about us there 27 years ago – about me, unsure of who I was at 20 years old with a brick shithouse for a body and how his preternatural stare brought me down to my knees.
It took twenty years for the spell to break about Ken – so deep under my skin had he penetrated. Sitting in my chair, eyes focused in front of me, I thought about my propensity to let a man in so fully that his very essence gets pumped fluidly through my veins vying for room with blood and whatnot. What makes a woman love like this – so profoundly?
G text me to meet her at Swirl, and it was a call to another self, the carefree out and about dancing on air self, and I chose to tuck in, wanting to feel comfortable with the woman I was, and can be, the one that is intense and has known and will know again desire that burns from the inside out.