Mmm...yep. People of the Atchafalaya Basin, you are playing Russian Roulette. If I see/hear one more of you say, "Well, it never floods here," I will break you/the nearest item. It never flooded here, either. "But we check our levees!" I thought I picked good food that time I got food poisoning, too. Nothing looked weird, and I was sicker than I had been in a very long time; in fact, it had been more than 13 years since I'd last vomited.
Lakeview never flooded, either. So I guess that means we DIDN'T get 11 feet of water at our house. Silly, silly, silly me. I've just been through hell in my imagination.
Did you not learn from us? Three day, 5 days, whatever your window is, don't wait. Get the hell out of there. You want to drown? You want to sift through your bedroom looking for cufflinks (which, years later, your husband finds in a bag he'd evacuated with). Didn't you learn? Didn't you bitch and groan about our kids being in your class? What about all of us flooding Wal-Marts and parking lots where Red Cross tents popped up? Karma's a BITCH.
Didn't you see our zombie stares? Didn't you get impatient when we'd break down in a grocery store looking at something that was in our fridge that we didn't get to eat? Didn't you put up with our mass depression and talk about us behind our backs (or in front of us, because you didn't know we were one of THOSE PEOPLE)?
Go back and refresh your memory in my 2005-2006 archives.
Have you not seen Tennessee and Mississippi? Are you that naive that you trust government-built and -controlled levee systems?
To borrow from the kids, you all need to GTF.
You wait, you miss bringing things. You wait, you get stuck in evacuation traffic. You wait, you drive 36 hours and almost crash your car because you can't keep your eyes open, but a rest stop is 15 miles away. You wait, you drown. You wait, you lose everything.
To those of you who told me, "It's just stuff," well, I'm not going to hold my tongue when you are irresponsible with your life.
Get out. Get out now.
I watch the news and stalk websites. I see inundation maps in my sleep. I'm flashing back like no tomorrow.
I haven't updated since September. Oddly enough, that's a month or so before I got help. Prolonged, postponed PTSD. Five years and two months worth. It's made a world of difference. But, these visuals are bad. Bad, bad, dirty bad. And you're all blindly going about your business, spouting confident answers.
You may be okay. But you may not be. Learn from us. Please, please, please. I've had enough personal tragedy in the last 10 months or so. I should catch you up later.
Don't be heroes. Don't gamble. This could be an empty chamber, and life will go on. Or, this could be the one with the bullet. Learn from us. It's better to be safe than sorry. Go. If you don't, good luck. Don't say I didn't warn you. I'd rather leave every time a threat arose, 10 million times, than take the chance that the 9,999,999th time will be THE one.
2 comments:
Ugh. "It's just stuff." Spoken by someone who has never looked a stack of moldy stuck together flood ravaged pictures or picked up that sludgey slimey scarf grandmaw knitted and not ever be able to forget that smell.
It's weird. I don't have to actually smell the smell still to remember it, but I can recall it instantly upon seeing, hearing, or just thinking about certain things.
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