My Coming Out Story: The Foreshadowing

Previously: "In a nutshell, I did great in the Army and decided to forego a career before it even started. I left basic and returned home to New Orleans and immediately enrolled in school and they wanted me to take all of these different classes that I did not need, so I found a distance learning program at LSU..."

2004 was one of the best and most bittersweet years of my life, I had no shortage of friends and things to do. That year I really got closer to my family and made new friends who are still around to this day. By day I would work on multiple jobs, not that I was financially hurting, my main two jobs were doing security and the other two were on call audio/visual jobs. It was nothing to take a nap and then go and help build a set for a concert or convention, meet my friends on St Ann and Bourbon for drinks, then wake up on one of their sofas. So let me be clear, it was a group of us, and it was normal for my friend Zargus to have his van and an ice chest with booze. We would all stay out until, hell the sun would beat us to our homes. I grown close to one who I would call my chosen brother, stacey (I hope he doesn't get pissed) and he would eventually move to houston toward the middle of the year.

His relocation to Houston was a foreshadowing of things to come, because by July I was hit with another loss. Remember in the last post I said that "...I sustained a major loss to my support system, the hit and run death of David. Remember that David, Willie, and Galen were my support system and somehow it slowly began to disintegrate." Well, for the month of July I had not heard from Willie and it was just not like him to not call. Me, Willie and other friends would hit the movies at least twice in a month, but when the movie day rolled around something just did not feel right. I called his parents house (he was living with them) and his dad answered the phone, and when I asked for Willie, I was told "He died yesterday" (in a calm voice). I seriously thought that I had the wrong phone number, it didn't hit me until the third phone call that I heard it all right. Come to find out that Willie was in the hospital and didn't want me to know.

Not long after this, Hurricane Ivan seemed to be headed toward New Orleans and prompted me to evacuate to Houston with a friend. For me this was a foreshadowing to the fact that I would be moving to Houston. Anyway the rest of the year would go by fast and this is where I would meet my equivalent to Mr. Big (Sex and the City) and like I said before, "I felt a shift towards the end of 2004...around and after my twentieth birthday I start to have really bad dreams about my street sign and water. I never paid any attention to the recurring dreams and went through the fall and winter as usual. But then this winter was different too, the weather was weird and on Christmas day, A DAY WE NORMALLY WEAR SHORTS ON, it snowed!!! I actually played in that snow long enough to make snowballs, mind you we could only get those at a stand in seven plus flavors."

2005 - The Houstonian

"By the spring I kept feeling this nagging itch to leave NOLA, like something bad was going to happen. Things were happening to make me want to leave, my friends were leaving, I lost my job and the dreams kept getting worse. By late may the dreams were the same images but this time with floating bodies, I would wake up in tears trying to understand what was happening and if I needed to seek psychiatric help. Anyway, by that point I made the decision to leave my stuff behind and head to Houston and see if I would like it. I would remain a legal resident of New Orleans, left most of my stuff behind and made it to Htown with the clothes on my back." I Got to Houston and hit the ground running, my best friend Stacey opened his home to me and I found a job within days. Big moved out to Houston with me and we shared an apartment together, eventually we were both itching to move back home. The plan was to move back to my old apartmentment and then:

 For more a deeper look at my Katrina experience click here...In the final two installments to this series I will talk about my experience with being HIV Positive and how I came out about it. Finally I will talk about being openly Atheist.