Painting by Emily Docheff

The Long Awaited Wasting

Read more Emily Docheff poems .here.

Read all of Bad Day.here.

The world was ready to love Frank Ocean. Frank Ocean took that as his cue to disappear.

Every hurricane begins as just a cloud over the ocean. Thirteen years ago, one of those clouds became Hurricane Katrina, devastating the Gulf Coast of the United States. The storm broke records, it broke levees, it killed almost 2,000 people.

Chelsea Borg is a soon-to-be graduate of the Communication Design program, who will be spending her first summer post-grad interning at Untitled Worldwide in New York City.

Twelve years before that hurricane got its name, devastation rained down on a much smaller scale. That moment, in Long Beach, California, was when Calvin Cooksey turned his back on his family. Katonya Breaux and her five year old son, Christopher Breaux, were suddenly alone on the West Coast. Calvin had left without so much as an explanation. Mother and son retreated to her hometown of New Orleans. There, Katonya’s parents would be able to support her and her child.

For the next twelve years, the family deepened their roots in Louisiana. In 2005, Christopher Breaux, now a teenager, moved himself into a dorm at the University of New Orleans. A jazz bar regular and car-washing, lawn-mowing, dog-walking hustler, Christopher was ready to begin his formal education studying music.

Then came Katrina.

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Ernest-Louis Lessieux. Tatiana sur une plage d’Oléro (Autochrome, c. 1920)

His thoughts used to be a bounty that always called to me. My sloshed child-self led me to his grungy crazy red headed presence. I was only ever fond of him, never romantic. I was more into women than him, but still he was always there. The lustful bond led to my daughter, Reya, the paragon of life and love. She is the core of my sacred dreamworld, all my creations are for her. With her birthed existence emerged a new sense of serenity of spirit. One that finally I didn’t have to smoke to feel. My daughter’s father is not the man my father is, he is much less. I find myself wondering, if he was to grow out of his arrogance and sober himself, if then I could love him. I no longer fool myself pretending to fill the void with what I know he can’t. I know that he can’t feed me like I can. His parents are sweet, but dysfunctional at home with him. My daughter’s father has made me cringe almost every time he’s ever tried to seduce or console me. He is endlessly frustrating, carelessly in his own world. He works and takes classes, but lacks in social skills and any sense or charm. I have to refocus his attention onto Reya. He gets excited with his thoughts. He thinks that anytime someone is in his vicinity, they want to be enlightened by whatever the fuck he happens to be pondering. His mind is always tripping balls in one sense or another, and he struggles to communicate with anyone without pissing them off. He is irritating and ugly, though sometimes, when he is quiet and observing, he is sexy. Mostly when he limits what he says, and doesn’t touch me, I enjoy him.

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Writing is like population control for my thoughts. Necessary for the health of the environment. My worries and obsessions are an invasive species in the delicate ecosystem of my sanity…” With no natural predator, they’re free to procreate wildly. They graze and gorge themselves on the fragile flora that is native to my mind, the little bursts and blooms of creativity, empathy, motivation. I pin these thoughts to paper to before they consume the entire food chain. Their numbers briefly diminished, my worries are banished again to the shadows of my mind.

What happens to a worry left untamed? Most times, I’ll find myself ruminating- taking an anxious thought and following it in a downward spiral, making one worry lead to another to another to another until I loop back to the first thing I was worrying about and begin the ritual again. Chewing over the same thought on a feedback loop. Why did I say that? Why did I say that?

Saul Steinberg

When I write, the words have already been spinning around in my head for a good three or four rotations. The act of writing, for me, is not the creation of the thought, but the opportunity to finally put it to rest. To control it. The sentence I’m writing at this moment has been fully formed in my head for the last three lines, and now, as I type, I’m free of it. It’s become just a cluster of black pixels against the bright white of my computer screen. When I can see something, when it becomes a physical object, I’m no longer being tasked to remember (and remember and remember over and over). Now untangled and displayed plainly, I can appreciate how harmless the simple sentence is. Appealing, even. What was once a predator is now a seed of an idea, planted for future exploration. The written rumination is safe and well preserved enough that I feel ready to face the next invasion.