Long Overdue Update

I'm so sorry to have left you guys in the lurch, although it certainly has made for interesting drama. First, let's go back to where we left our heroine, with the walls caving in...

Did you know that near-fatal disaster makes you thirsty? Or maybe it's brick dust. When I posted the now-rather-well-known "last post," I was crouched in my bathroom trying to drink the dusty water that I had run into my bathtub a couple of hours earlier.

I also called 911, and when they couldn't help, called my mother and my boyfriend and told them I was probably not going to have another chance to speak to them. Ever. I cried, I screamed. I heard my mother panic. I had to hang up because I didn't want to hear her, or her to hear me.

It was the most alone I've ever felt. I thought, I must have been a screaming idiot not to have realized how bad this could be. I must have been crazy and arrogant to think that I could make it through this by myself. Surely, everyone else in the city is somewhere else, and I'm the only one left in the French Quarter, or even New Orleans.

But after you've decided you're going to die, there's not much to do. I tried to pray, or sing gospel songs or take deep cleansing breaths, to no avail. There was so much adrenaline in my system I couldn't sit still, so I kept darting out into the rest of the apartment trying to find a way out.

My usual way out is a balcony: out the door, down the balcony, around the corner and down the stairs. That balcony is all but gone. Although my entire wall is open, I cannot step out into anything except a 10-foot fall that would be broken the hard way by any number of bricks and jagged timbers.

Also, now that I'm trying to think, I realize I'm wearing a shirt, nothing else, and the wall has fallen on my clean clothes. While I am trying to reach some clothes, a heavy gust of wind comes up and I duck under the kitchen counter. I find a hairbrush. I know it's pretty worthless in the circumstances, but I pick it up anyway. And then I look up and on the other kitchen counter (i.e. right in my line of sight), I see my tennis shoes, which I had previously assumed were under the bricks in the other room.

Yes, this, gentle reader, was the Moment of Clarity. I realized then that I was not going to die. "I have shoes, therefore I must be going somewhere." Shortly after this, I found my (filthy and wet, but still extant) blue shorts near the head of the bed and put them on. I also had my backpack (to put my hairbrush and Palm Pilot in) and was thus armed and ready to get the heck out of there.

The next thing I noticed was there was a window which looked out at the staircase. The door to the stairs was somehow open, so I could see that the stairs were still there. I grabbed a hand-weight and then bricks and started throwing them through the window. In a few seconds, I heard my downstairs neighbor yelling up to see what the noise was. He didn't know I was in the building, and I hadn't known until then that he was in the building.

So, Wayne helped me climb out of my window, locked the door behind me and took me downstairs to his apartment, where his partner Steve was sleeping through the whole thing. However, they'd lost their bathroom under the same rubble that had taken my balcony and front wall. Wayne cut the water off because the building's water main had broken. We tried to take a nap, and, being in the more stable part of the building, passed through the rest of the storm rather uneventfully.

Now, I have to return my mother's minivan so she can get home from work. I have more to say. A lot more. Please keep reading.