For months after Katrina my neighbors only spoke of damage they were trying to un-do.
My old apartment was destroyed and my new apartment was surrounded by unlit streets and empty homes. Mail rarely came; trash stayed. Men twice my age asked me out. Maybe I’m a woman now, I theorized, I’ve changed. I was twenty.
But it wasn’t me. There were hardly any women in town. Instead we had contractors, laborers, developers, businessmen, and fathers without families.
I befriended a young mother at a potluck and a week later she was murdered. A few blocks from me, a neighbor was raped in her bedroom.
Meanwhile the men kept appearing: a diamond dealer, a lawyer, a cafe owner, a Dutch engineer. I did not feel unsafe at dinner. They dropped me off at my home by the train tracks, not-kissed, a hundred dollars poorer.