Now that it's August and the 15th anniversary of #HurricaneKatrina is nigh, I really can't stop thinking about how much it altered the course of my life.

I spent the first half of my senior year displaced & lived the second half with my sister cuz my mom had to move to Houston.

The VA couldn't keep her in Baton Rouge and that was the next closest one. My high school reopened so I went back home.

I meant to go out of state for school but I was so traumatized at the thought of being permanently severed from New Orleans by another hurricane, I went to UNO

I watched as the country was divided on it's response to my city's suffering. How so many of us were met with kindness while so many others were met with hate.

I watched how the media villainized Black New Orleanians and I watched how people said we should've been left to drown.

I watched love and help outpour from so many around the world while seeing other Americans say New Orleans was a lost cause and how they didn't care. Calling us refugees.

I watched how the fucking government just let people sit there and die in the heat and in the water for a week.

I remember trying to locate family and friends that were stuck or thrown across the country.

I remember watching TV and seeing people who lived 10 minutes from me begging for someone to save them from their rooftops. Babies. The Elderly. Some friends and family got stuck.

I remember coming home and seeing the spray paint that marked my house as clear.

The same one was sprayed on a neighbor's house across the street but it was wrong because they missed him when they searched the house. His own child found him when they came looking for him.

I can still smell the mold at times. It was hot. My house was absolutely covered in it with a marked water line. Everything above it was pristine like the day I left. Everything below it looked like my house had been left behind for decades.

Household mold triggers me and I couldn't even look at bread mold without feeling ill for a while after because my brain would make the jump.

I cannot sit in traffic because it reminds me of evacuations. I have to desperately distract myself or I start legit losing it in my car.

I have nightmares about drowning/flooding that always ramp up during Hurricane season.

I panic if so much as a Tropical Storm starts coming this way because our pumping system is shit.

I wait for the inevitable six months a year every year.

It is Hell for my brain.

Every single August, I think about the me that could have been had Katrina not happened.

She is constantly on my mind.

What different friends would she have? What job? What partners?

Would she have succeeded where I constantly fail?

Would she have to desperately cling to hyperfixations to get her through every single day of her life?

Would she have made bolder, braver choices?

Would she be more than I am?

Would she even still be alive?

The only thing I know is that she wouldn't have this Katrina tattoo on her calf.

I will never know that girl though because it happened and I cannot change it.

But I cannot help but stop and think "What if..."

And she haunts me. Through August and September she haunts me.

Through every Hurricane season- as the climate changes and the Gulf grows warmer- she haunts me.

As I watch the New Orleans I grew up with disappear to make way for gentrification, she haunts me.

As I get priced out of my home while being stuck, she haunts me.

Because who would I be if I could have been allowed to be her, free from this specific type of trauma?

I will never know.

I just know that I will never be free of it.

Katrina and the aftermath will forever be tied to my life's thread.

Because I forget a lot of things- things I wish I would never forget & things I never want to remember.

But I will never forget the day the levees broke and everything that came after it for the rest of my days

I'm tired.

It's been 15 years and I'm tired.

I was tired at 17 and I'm tired at 32.

I'm still here but I'm so fucking tired.

I can't not be tired because of PTSD and that makes me tired.