I’m Dancing As Fast As I Can

I’m in the backseat of a Lyft, somewhere between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, crossing the low-slung bridge over the Atchafalaya Basin. The driver says little. The music is low. Cypress trees rise up from the water, their roots swallowed by the swamp. The air here feels thick with memory. The kind of place where the past doesn’t just linger—it lives.

It’s a stretch of I-10 I know too well. The road bends, the horizon flattens, and the names on the signs—Gonzales, Sorrento, LaPlace—feel like echoes from another life. This is not just a highway. It’s a crossing. A passage. From the life I built to the life I left behind.

As I head east, the Mississippi River runs to my right. You don’t see it the whole way, but you feel its presence. Its weight. Its history. A body that holds generations of stories and struggle, just beneath the surface.

I came to Louisiana for work—or that’s what I told myself. But the truth is, I needed to see my sister. I needed to see my mother. I needed to touch the soil of home, even if just for a few hours.

My sister is recovering from a mini stroke. A blood clot on her brain. Aphasia. Her speech comes in pieces now—scattered, slow. But she talks more than ever, pushing through the pauses with more determination than frustration. She is still mobile. Still independent. Still her. If you try to help, she’ll wave you off. She wants to do it herself. And she does.

My mother, 83, lives with her now. Not because she has to, but because she wants to. She is not a caregiver by job description. She is a mother. That’s different. That runs deeper. She has buried one daughter already—my sister Leisa, who drowned in 2018—and now she holds steady next to the one who remains. I look at her and see a quiet kind of grace that comes only from long years of loving people through what they didn’t ask for.

I was here in January, when my sister first fell ill. I stayed nearly two weeks. Thought we’d rounded a corner. But life doesn’t follow plans. It unfolds. And when I found myself scheduled to be in New Orleans again, I called them.

“We’re fine,” my mother said.

“Don’t… come… down,” my sister added.

“You… tired… need rest.”

Even in broken speech, the message was clear. You don’t have to take care of us.

But love doesn’t listen to reason. I took an Uber west, out of New Orleans, across the basin. Past signs I’ve seen all my life. I followed the road back into the gravity of home.

It was lunchtime when I arrived. I picked up fried catfish and a green salad from a little place near my sister’s house. Fries for me. Steamed vegetables for her. I showed up with a suitcase in one hand and a brown paper bag in the other. They didn’t expect me.

“You hardheaded,” my mother said at the door, shaking her head. But there was a softness in her voice. My sister smiled wide, full of light. “Don?!”

We sat at the kitchen counter. Not the dining table—the table was for holidays and wakes. The counter was for living. They were in pajamas, like they often are now, keeping company with the day from just inside the open garage. Watching the street. The neighbors. The comings and goings of a world that moves fast, even when you no longer do.

Today, we stayed at the counter.We ate. We talked. And then I did what sons do when they come home: I fixed things.

My sister asked me to update her YouTube membership so she could keep watching The Don Lemon Show. My mom wasn’t getting notifications. “YouTube isn’t working,” she said. It was. I fixed it. Then came Substack—she couldn’t find my newsletters. I downloaded the app, turned on alerts, logged her in. These were the kinds of things I could fix. And I wanted to. Because so much else, I can’t.

It was a short visit. Just a few hours. Not nearly enough. When I said I had to leave, I told them my Uber had canceled earlier, and my sister let out a full, satisfied laugh. “Stay… front room,” she said. Her guest room. I wanted to. But New Orleans was calling. The airport. The life I’ve built.

Before I left, I asked for a photo. We stepped under the open garage door, our backs to the sun, the house in front of us. My mother stood in the middle—always the center. My sister on one side. I on the other. Arms around her, holding on. You can see our faces clearly. And in them: the years, the distance, the history, the love. All of it.

We hugged at the door. My sister cried. Even though she told me not to come, she cried when I left. My mother wiped her face and nodded, like she was giving me permission. “Go on,” she said. “We’ll be alright.”

Now I’m riding east again. Back across the same bridge. Past the same signs. The Mississippi still rolling to my right. And I am thinking, as I always do, that I want to save them. Take them with me. Protect them. But they don’t need saving. They’ve chosen this life. This rhythm. This home.

I live in New York. I have a husband. Three dogs. A career. A full, good life. But part of me is always there—at that counter, fixing their phones, listening closely to every fractured sentence, memorizing the sound of love. This is what it means to leave home and still belong to it. To be the baby boy of a Southern family. A Black man who got out—but never truly left. This is the dance. The constant sway between presence and absence. Between duty and desire. Between the past that made you and the life you built to survive it.

I’m dancing as fast as I can. My feet hurt. But not nearly as much as my heart.