Jazz Fest, May 1997.

We will be back in this very same spot in one week, bitches! 

First time back, post-Katrina.

The city of New Orleans will always hold a special place in my heart. And not just because I went to college there. My husband and I met there during Jazz Fest, exactly one year before this picture was taken.

(Props to my friend Rachel, BTW, for taking this awesome shot).

Anyway. The reason I’m telling you this story goes a little something like this. 

Two months before I met my husband, I was engaged to another guy. We’d been together for about 5 years, and then one morning, when I was innocently putting on my mascara and getting ready to leave for work, he waltzes into the bathroom of the apartment we’d been sharing for the last three years and tells me he doesn’t want to get married.

I’ll spare you all the sad, sordid details (though I know you’re probably dying for them) and get straight to the moral.

Say you’ve just been dumped by your future husband and your entire foundation has just been ripped out from beneath you. And say your best friend calls from LA to invite you to go to Jazz Fest with her. And say you really don’t want to go because you aren’t quite ready to face life as a single chick in NYC, let alone on vacation in New Orleans. But then one morning you wake up and you think “Fuck it. I’m going!” So you take a leap and you book a flight. And you freaking go. And then, say, that very first night, you stumble upon the guy of your dreams at 5 o’clock in the morning, when you may or may not be engaging in mind-altering activities and may or may not be dancing on a pool table. Turns out, he lives five blocks from you back in Manhattan. And one of the friends you are now in New Orleans with? Turns out he used to date her.

So do you give him your number? Do you tell him you’ve just been dumped three months before what would have been your wedding?

Yes… and hell freaking No.

You tell him it was EIGHT months ago. 

And then one day, after you’ve been dating for say, two or three months, you bite the bullet and tell him the truth.

If he doesn’t care that up until this point your entire relationship has been based on a lie… well, then, he’s The One.

And that moral I was referring to before?

Whoever told you aren’t going to meet the guy you’re going to marry on the rebound, on vacation, in a bar, at five o’clock in the morning, all juiced up, while dancing on a pool table and telling lies…

Was mother-freaking wrong.