Imagine this for a second.

Hours after you have a small glimmer of hope with your power, only to see that extinguished because a transformer blew out five minutes later, you’re once again forced to take your laptop and cell phone to your friend’s art gallery in the Quarter to charge, a practice that you’ve been repeating for the last six days.

Your legs and entire body feels sore as shit due to the constant biking for wi-fi, charging stations, and food. You’ve had to sleep on the porch of your building a couple of days at night because of no electricity. You have a neighbor that is a complete doofus that has driven you crazy for the last week and you’re praying to every higher power for electricity.

After milling about for a few hours in the Quarter, you return to your neighborhood and make a stop at the library. You’re not paying attention to your cell phone or notifications while you bike, just the road. Once you sit down and log into the wi-fi at the library, you pull out your phone and check your notifications. A Facebook notification about a comment from a video you posted on August 28^th appears from a longtime friend of your mom, a person that basically watched you grow up. You don’t think anything about the notification or even the comment, you’re focused on the now.

Then you read it. It’s your estranged mom, who watched a video that you posted from a week ago, prior to the landfall of Ida, about why you didn’t evacuate. Instead of being understanding about why, you’re cursed out.

“Your ass didn’t want to come home,” she wrote. ‘

Granted, I didn’t help matters by saying at the end of the video I knew where my true family was, which some took as shade towards the city of Memphis and relatives, but the fact that I chose to ride out a hurricane and not evacuate to Memphis over dealing with a mom I hadn’t spoken to in six years, speaks volumes.

Not to mention that the fact that the first communication in six years is a rebuke about a video in which I laid out my reasons for staying instead of seeing how I was doing.

That was the upsetting part.

If you have the energy to say things like that in a comment section about a video, then you could have used said friend’s account to check on how I was doing.

In times of crisis, people’s true colors show up. Sometimes for good and sometimes for bad.

What happened on Saturday showed my mom’s true colors.

For the worst.