New Orleans.

Every lost soul seems to end up here eventually.

I’m no different.

Someone with a better option generally isn’t warming a barstool at 2 o’clock on Tuesday. I stare down the gleaming mahogany bar, remnants of a different age, before turning back to the swirling amber contents of my glass. I knock back the watery remnants of my whiskey, relishing the burn before signaling the bartender for another.

Go to college, they said. You’re nothing without a degree.

You like to write? Be a journalist. That’s a respected field.

I snort at the thought. Maybe a decade ago I would have waltzed out of grad school and into an internship. From there, a paid gig and I’d be staring at my byline from those wrinkled pages for the rest of my career.

Not anymore.

More papers close up shop every day, and the magazines are following suit. Bloggers rule the news world now, and in the cutthroat realm of the internet, you’re dead in the water unless you have an angle that brings in the clicks.

Right now my only angle is my desperate desire to pay the overdue student loan bill buried in the bottom of my purse.

The bartender returns with a new glass, filled to the brim with the harsh well whiskey. It tastes like paint thinner that dreams of being whiskey when it grows up, but even that manages to be a splurge for me right now.

“I made it a double,” the bartender says, setting the glass down in front of me. “No charge. You look like you need it.”

A few years ago, I would have bristled at the assumption that I needed anything, but now I just smile gratefully and sip my drink, the smoky flavor letting me forget just for awhile.

I’m not another tourist or a person who moved here on a whim after too many Anne Rice novels. I grew up here, eating beignets with my parents as a child and coating my face with powdered sugar.

“Looks like we’re getting some snow this year, Gracie!” The terrible dad jokes rolled so easily off my father’s tongue as he ruffled my blonde curls, brushing away the sugar that had landed there while my mother sipped a cafe au lait and giggled at his antics.

We were so happy then.

I’d learned to drive on those narrow, twisting streets, weaving my dad’s battered red Jeep down Magazine Street at 16, white knuckling it at the endless stream of tourists and locals that seemed to ignore every traffic rule my parents had been drilling into my young mind.

I hadn’t been driving that day.

I take another sip of whiskey, trying to dampen the memories that threaten to bubble up. The scent of scorched rubber and hot metal. The glint of the red and blue lights making the shards of glass littering the street sparkle in the night. The sharp, metallic taste of blood on my lips and the bracing scent of ozone in the air.

Coming back here was a mistake.

I loved this city with a fierce devotion usually only reserved for a soulmate or a beloved family member. I thought seven years was enough time to numb my loss to the point that I could start over in the only place I’d ever considered home.

Turns out my major wasn’t the only thing I was wrong about.

After the accident, I was shipped off to my father's sister. Kind but far from nurturing, Aunt Caroline was a big shot divorce lawyer in Boston. She and her husband had never wanted kids, so being thrust into the guardianship of an emotionally destroyed teenager was an adjustment for everyone.

Understatement of the century there.

Spending the first 16 years of my life in New Orleans where the wild, vibrant energy of the city permeated your surroundings as inevitably as the humidity didn't begin to prepare me for Boston.

The narrow, confusing streets made to fit carriages rather than SUVs were familiar, but beyond that, I might as well have been on another planet. The sky was a uniform shade of dull grey when I touched down on the runway, dragging my mother's worn leather suitcase behind me.

I stepped out of the airport, barely hearing my Aunt’s words about school and sending for the rest of my things. I followed behind her, the dull thump of my boots on the damp asphalt filling my ears instead.

I remember the cold most of all. In the rush to bring me to the safety of adult supervision and settle me into my new life, no one had considered that I didn't own anything warmer than a hoodie. October in Boston was a very different beast than back home, and I spent that first day quivering like a leaf until my Aunt noticed and handed me a pile of Harvard sweatshirts to bury myself in until we could go shopping for something appropriate.

I sigh, dropping my empty whiskey glass onto the bar with a faint clunk. The last thing I intended to do was spend my day dredging up old ghosts, but that’s the thing with New Orleans.

Ghosts are everywhere here. It doesn’t matter if you believe in the supernatural or not, after a few weeks in this city it crawls inside you. You never even notice the transition from comfortable skepticism until you find yourself popping into a voodoo shop to pick up a gris-gris bag before a first date and the cleansing you use your Florida water for has nothing to do with making your floors shine.

My ghosts are nowhere more present than right at home. Aunt Caroline had enough forethought to know that I’d end up back on the cracked doorstep of my parents’ house one day. She managed to find a few student renters over the last seven years, charging exorbitant deposits and cheap rent to attract someone more likely to love the house than destroy it.

The most recent was a nursing student at Tulane who had vacated the place for a job in Chicago after graduation. Suddenly, my home was mine again.

It seemed as good a sign as any that it was a time to come back.

Unlocking the yellow door of that shotgun house after so many years. . . it still takes my breath away. I push the door shut behind me, closing out the noise and the bustle of uptown and walk into the silent house.

The world seems muffled in here. The house was always rented furnished, so the years barely changed it. The deep crimson of the living room that my mother had insisted on in a fit of gothic fancy when I was ten still makes the room a bit too dark.

Standing like sentinels in each corner of the room are the four straight-backed “company chairs” upholstered in cream velvet. I’ve never once seen anyone sit on those uncomfortable chairs, but Mom had dragged them home from a shuttering antique shop one day, and there they had stayed.

My old bedroom was relegated to a storage closet by most of the tenants. The pulpy horror novels I favored at that age still line the bookshelves, and the narrow twin bed is hidden under a bold green and blue tapestry I’ve never seen before, no doubt abandoned by another college senior who outgrew a freshman year hippie aesthetic.

Across the hall, the door to the larger bedroom is shut, heavy oak keeping it locked in the past for just a few more minutes. I grasp the brass knob, the finish having long since been worn down to a dull gold and turn it a bit harder than necessary.

It’s so bare. The queen-sized bed dominates the center of the room, and the massive mahogany wardrobe and dresser take up another wall. The various knick-knacks and tangled mess of necklaces that covered that surface are still locked in storage with the rest of the personal items.

After so much time it’s impossible, but I would swear on a stack of Bibles that I can still smell her perfume lingering in the air, lush rose with just the slightest hint of jasmine.

A perfect mirror of when I left, I returned to New Orleans with only what I could stuff in my mother's old suitcase. Funny how even now I can’t let myself claim any of it as mine. My mother's suitcase. My parents' house. Even when I look in the mirror, all I can see is the mix of the two of them that had somehow created me.

I’ve long since stopped talking about my loss to anyone. After seven years, everyone expects you to have moved on. Aunt Caroline still gets a bit misty-eyed on Dad's birthday, but beyond that, she has her own life to live. Other than a sadly wistful smile when anyone mentions his name, she’s fine.

I lost touch with most of my New Orleans friends in the tumultuous first year in Boston. I don’t blame any of them for it. After too many stilted phone conversations where I broke down in tears railing at the unfairness of life and how much I hated Boston and the universe for stealing my parents and my Aunt for daring to be alive, the calls stopped coming.

Long emails turned into cursory messages about their lives, filled with bright snapshots of parades and festivals, and eventually, those were traded in for Facebook updates. Likes and one sentence comments were all I had left of my childhood friends.

As for Boston, I'd been shoved into a tiny private school by my Aunt's office halfway through my junior year. The children of the Boston elite hadn't known quite what to make of me with my bright clothes and slow Louisiana drawl. Even locked in grief, my open Southern attitude didn't fit with the standoffish New Englanders, so any friendships slid over the surface of my life like an oil slick, never penetrating who I really was.

Leaving had been an easy choice, but returning to New Orleans wasn’t.

Somehow I expected myself to fit back into my old life. I was supposed to unlock my front door and be welcomed back home, instantly falling into a job and friendships. Maybe even a relationship. My life here should have just been on pause, waiting for me to come back and take up my rightful place again.

Instead, the city moved on without me. I’m lucky enough that the house has long since been paid off, but my loans are coming due, and a paid in full mortgage doesn’t cover utilities.

My parent's modest life insurance policies were enough to buy me a car and cover my books and expenses at school, but beyond that, I was on my own now. With too much pride to call my Aunt begging for money, I took the first job I could find, slinging shots at one of the many forgettable bars lining Bourbon Street.

Inside the bar, I’m not a sad, lonely orphan hiding from her own memories anymore. Once I pull on the skimpy black tank top with SPIRITS scrawled across my breasts, I can be someone else. Someone who flirts with tourists, catching the gaze of over-served college students and luring them to buy yet another round of shots because everything tastes better out of a blinking plastic skull.

The party never stops on Bourbon Street, and the moment I cross the threshold of that bar each night, I make those words my life philosophy.

Inside the bar, my coworkers call me G, and being that girl is so much easier. For a few hours each night, I can forget about being Grace with her solitude and overdue bills. Even more, I can forget the shadow of Gracie, the girl frozen in time with her smile and her happy family.

Compartmentalizing my life to that degree might be a few county lines over from “healthy,” but I’d spent too many years taking the advice of everyone in my life who considered themselves older and wiser. All that got me was a useless degree and whole lot of sadness.

Now my therapy is painting my lips hot pink and pasting a wide smile across them while I pour glass after glass of sticky sweet booze for minimum wage and whatever extra dollars I can entice a Spring Breaker to shove inside the glitter encrusted plastic skull we use as a tip jar. Maybe if I laugh loud enough and smile big enough I can lose myself in the bright lights of the city and finally forget.