What places exist only as images in your mind, clipped, collaged, and disjointed? What once bright and vivid colors, now locked behind lowered lids, have yellowed and browned with age? What smells stick sour to the edges of your nostrils, even though you haven’t breathed them in in years? What ghostly textures tickle your palms, even now, decades later?

People say New Orleans is a haunted city, a city settled and buoyed by ever-wandering souls. When I’m there, the spirits I sense are those I know and knew: ghosts of my younger selves, and ghosts of my family, the ones still alive and the ones laughing, talking, cooking, forever in my memory. I used to spend a lot of time in New Orleans: every Christmas and at least one slow, heavy summer, when I passed my days lying on a blue bed in a blue room watching hornets outside build and buzz. In spite of the storm and the flood, that old house in New Orleans East still stands, as colorful and dignified as it was then, the rooms now rebuilt in perfect order inside my mind.

Then and now, in New Orleans: shimmering orange light bounces off the gulf, weaving through canals in the low-lying streets like neon warp and weft. Humid air wraps its thick arms around me, tucking me in tight, pushing against my skin, filling my lungs, slowing me down. Things cling — Spanish moss to live oak branches, mardi gras beads to iron railing, centuries of grime to wooden floorboards and victorian detailing, short shotgun houses to soft ground, ground that opened up beneath them before and surely will again.

I just spent a handful of too-short days back in New Orleans. My family was there with me, some in body and some in spirit, as they have always been. There are more words to be written about this place, to help me sort out and understand the hazy images and sounds in my memory. But for today, at least, this is a start.