The T in Tchoupitoulas

Sometimes a single word can break the spell of an ordinary day. I’m sitting under fluorescent light, in a room where nothing moves but the clock, when the name Tchoupitoulas flashes across my screen. It’s a street in New Orleans, but to me it’s a spell, a sound that belongs to another version of myself—the one who remembers rain that smelled like beer and brass, the one who felt part of something. I love that I know how to say it, that I can feel its rhythm on my tongue. In a world that so often flattens feeling into function, even pronouncing it feels like rebellion. Maybe that’s what this essay is about: how a place, or a word, can hold the parts of you that a life of efficiency keeps trying to erase.

I found New Orleans when I was younger and braver with my curiosity, before routine hardened into responsibility. The first time I heard Tchoupitoulas, it sounded like a secret—an inside joke shared by locals, impossible to decode without knowing how to keep time. Then came making groceries, lagniappe, and “let’s meet on the neutral ground by Camellia Grill.” Words and phrases that didn’t just name things but carried whole worlds in their syllables. Each one felt like a test of entry, a small proof of how much I wanted to belong. Say it right, and people smiled. Say it wrong, and they could tell you were just passing through. I wanted it so badly I practiced under my breath like a prayer: CHOP-a-too-liss.

There’s a brewery on that street—Urban South, for anyone who wants to go—metal walls, cement floor, the smell of wet earth and yeast. It was raining the afternoon I was there, the kind of downpour that erases sidewalks and demands surrender. Water pooled ankle-deep, finding every crack the levees never fixed. Inside, a child’s birthday party carried on. Parents drank craft beer around a bounce house inflated under a tin roof. Kids screamed joy into thunder. How New Orleans—to build celebration in a warehouse while the city floods outside. How human, really, to keep dancing through the damage.

It was that same trip when we heard they’d pulled a car out of the levee—one that had been sitting there since Katrina. Someone had wedged a cement block on the gas pedal to collect the insurance money, and the river swallowed the lie for over a decade. When the cleanup crew found it, they found seven more just like it. The city had been carrying those ghosts all along, metal bodies rusting quietly beneath the waterline.

I remember reading about it and thinking, of course. Of course the flood held secrets. Of course there were stories no one wanted to claim. That’s the New Orleans I love—the honesty of its corruption, the way it refuses to separate tragedy from ingenuity. A place where even crime becomes folklore, and neglect transforms into archaeology.

And yet, for all its chaos, New Orleans still knows exactly who it is. You can see it in a kitchen like Leah Chase’s. I once watched her teaching a local TV host how to make gumbo. At first she’s all warmth, tossing in ingredients and endearments—“baby” this, “baby” that—until the man suggests corn. She stops, gives him a look that could curdle the roux, and says nothing for a beat too long. That look said everything: we’re generous here, but we have our lines.

That’s the essence of the city—wide open and fiercely specific. You can dance in the rain, you can rebuild your house three times, you can toss whatever life hands you into the pot—but don’t you dare put corn in our gumbo.

The whole city is gumbo. No other place in America has produced a chemical reaction quite like New Orleans. Even in my current home, Los Angeles—with its Koreatown, Little Ethiopia, Little Tokyo—cultures tend to sit side by side, each in its own lane. In New Orleans they collided: African, Spanish, French, Haitian, German, Irish, Filipino. Out of that friction came one sound, one flavor, one tone—Cajun. It’s messy, miraculous, and absolutely glorious.

The memories I’ve been lucky enough to gather in the Crescent City have followed me for years. Every time I think I’ve outgrown it, it reappears—today on a computer screen, tomorrow in a passing conversation. The city keeps finding me, as if to remind me that resilience and denial sometimes wear the same costume. New Orleans has always been both: an open wound and a brass band. Maybe that’s why I love it. It doesn’t hide its weather.

I’ve been trying to learn that skill myself—to celebrate through heartbreak, to stay soft in systems built to numb. I wish I could say I’m good at it. Mostly, I still feel like the person standing just outside the party, watching other people know the steps. Lately, I think of old lives that felt fuller, louder—the quiet ache of not getting to stay for the last dance, the way certain memories turn into cities you keep returning to in your mind. I think of the different versions of home that other people seem to find so easily, while I orbit alone in the silence between songs. I think of the office I sit in now, where even the emails feel leveed against feeling—dry, contained, built to never flood.

In New Orleans, emotion is architecture. It drips from balconies, echoes through trumpets, hangs in the air like humidity. Here, in this office, sadness has no language. There’s only the hum of fluorescent lights, the shuffle of papers that never seem to matter. Maybe that’s why the word Tchoupitoulas undoes me—it’s everything this world forgets to say out loud.

Can you love a place that didn’t raise you? Can you claim connection to something you only passed through? I don’t know. But I do know the way my body recognizes the rhythm of that name. I do know what it means to pronounce something with reverence, to care for what isn’t yours. Maybe that’s what love actually is: attention without ownership.

When I whisper Tchoupitoulas now, it feels like a small act of devotion. To the city that taught me how to feel. To the people I can’t reach anymore. To the versions of myself that keep moving through rain, ankle-deep, laughing anyway.

Maybe belonging isn’t who raised you.

Maybe it’s who teaches you how to feel.