#she hasn't had a meaningful conversation with a human woman or girl since she was 14. no peers no friends

[breha]

i'm reading crescent city girls: the lives of young black women in segregated new orleans by lakisha michelle simmons and one detail in it is about how although the french quarter during the first half of the twentieth century was overwhelmingly white, a black order of nuns owned a building there, at what's currently the site of the bourbon orleans hotel, from 1881 to 1965. they lived there and ran an orphanage and a school for girls (the order and the school still exist, just in a different neighborhood). i think it's an affecting image that 1132 royale street was so close (a 7-minute walk, just down the street and around the corner) to a high school claudia was pointedly not attending. she probably walked by the building hundreds of times, at night when it was shuttered and quiet. she walked by it when she was 14, 15, 16, 17, just like the girls who studied there, but she was fundamentally separated from them forever. she could go there, even slip into the classrooms or the dormitory where the nuns slept, but she could never get there, across the veil to the place it was during the day. and at first she didn't really grasp what any of this meant because it was novel, even a little exciting, it made her feel special – "i've gotta go to bed when the rest of the world wakes up, so there's less kids to play with..." – but you know it sank in eventually. as the students moved from grade to grade, graduated, grew up, and were replaced by new girls, claudia stayed the same. her and the building, its balconies, its arched windows, the cross against the night sky, unchanging. singular. forever. fuck!!!!!!!!