Even my own little world has nightmares

In my mind all week, Louis Armstrong has been singing:

Do you know what it means
to miss New Orleans
and miss it each day of the year?

During the day I alternate between anger and keeping myself distracted and functioning. Anger can anesthetize as surely as drugs and alcohol; distraction is a form of fight-or-flight behavior, I think. It's such a helpless feeling to see so much and not be able to do a damned thing about it.

In the evenings, I try more distraction--run, run, run away--and have to turn off the news at a certain point because my spirit keeps sinking lower. I try to bury myself in books and writing and stupid TV shows, but I'm restless.

At night, though, in sleep--the levee breaks. All the things I haven't been able to take in during the day come flooding in on me: Katrina and its aftermath, the faces of the people on the news, their voices crying out, and--over and over again--that dog stuck on that roof of a flooded house all by himself.

I woke up around midnight because I heard the front windows shatter, people trying to get in to my apartment. Everything was quiet once I opened my eyes. Two hours later it was an angry, animalistic shriek that woke me. But there wasn't anyone shrieking except in my dreams. A couple hours after that someone calling frantically for help brought me awake, and I forget what woke me that last time. It was time to get up, anyway. To go to work and get back to the routine of my life.

Now, my pissant dreams aren't anything compared to the genuine suffering that's happening on the Gulf Coast. I'm not suggesting that. They're not even very important. But I know I'm not alone in this. I've spoken to a couple of other people whose nightmares are heavily influenced by Katrina. It was good to know I wasn't alone in this.

You're not alone, either, if it's happening to you.