Dear Dylan,

I should've typed and posted this last night when we got off the plane:
    
     These are things I feel I need to tell you about but I don't believe they are things I can be poetic about.
     I've been trying to write this for awhile now. Being 40,000 feet up in the air with nearly 4 hours of spare time, I figure now would be a good time to conjoin my thoughts. Last Saturday, our first full day in New Orleans, we visited the lower ninth ward and saw many parts of the city. Probably to your amazement, we saw much demolition and debris still left from the storm. This is not a poem. We had the opportunity to see and go inside a small, very typical New Orleans style shotgun house. When I say typical not only do I mean in the sense of the architectural layout of the house, but also in the sense that like many other homes in New Orleans, this house was completely destroyed and ripped apart by Katrina. We walked around inside the gutted house, trying to get the slightest idea of what it might have been like to live in this house. This not a poem. You won't know the troubles I've seen unless you've seen them yourselves, likewise, I will never know the troubles these people have experienced because I was not there to experience it.
      I keep looking down at all the blank space on this sheet of paper and then out the window of the plane at skyscrapers that appear to be half the size of my fingernail from up here. At the paper and out the window. Over and over again I repeat this and I am still unsure of what it is exactly that I am trying to convey to you.
     While in the abandoned house we came across a notebook lying on the dusty floor. The notebook contained love letters addressed to Dylan from Monique. The love letters were discussing how she had been and what she had been up to and classes she was taking. In one of them she explained how this was not the only letter she had written to him and not sent. I obviously don't know much about Dylan nor Monique except form whatever I read in the letters, but it got me wondering: would she have ended up sending them?
     Down here at cemeteries, caskets and tombstones are both above ground so that if a storm were to hit again we wouldn't be seeing any caskets coming up from the ground and dead bodies floating down the streets like they've seen before. Mr. Kane was telling us how in some parts of the city if we were to dig down a few feet we would still find parts to washing machines and pieces of appliances from washed out homes.
     These are things I feel I need to tell you about but I don't believe they are things that I can be poetic about. Because there's nothing beautiful about never sent love letters. There's nothing beautiful about abandoned destroyed houses. There's nothing beautiful about spray painted x's on the front paneling to tell you what diseases they found and how many dead bodies they found within the home upon inspection. And there's certainly nothing beautiful about dead bodies breaking out of their caskets and floating down the streets- in a city which is already drowning in 20 feet of water. And that's just the beginning.


~Dominique