i have too much to say i guess for just a facebook status. this time of year makes me so anxious, i am almost feral. foaming-at-the-mouth-tense. it starts mid-august and ends around the end of September. maybe it is my late friend denise's birthday, or lack there of. maybe it is left over anxiety from being a child and having end of summer blues. I still get excited as the summer approaches the way i did because I feel in my heart forever that school is out soon (although i will work regardless).
on the 10th year anniversary of September 11th, i feel like i should feel something more or something different then i have felt for the past ten years and i cannot put my finger on anything i feel, better or worse, that is really any different. I suppose i reflect the same way everyone else does. thinking about where they were that day. i was on my way to world trade center, to obtain the new tori amos single for strange little girls, because it was new release Tuesday. i had located a sam goody at the trade center a week prior. my train slowed down quite a bit after 14th street, and i realized i couldn't make it down in time, so i exited at Canal street to walk to my office.
my cd Walkman ear buds....everyone always said a bomb could go off and i would not hear it. as usual , i was listening to bjork. the sky was so BLUE. so beautiful. I stared at it as I exited the train stairs and I too thought, what a beautiful day. The evening before, before it rained, on my walk home from my train I had stopped and stared at the lights of co-op city from afar...thinking the same thing....what a beautiful night.
i walked up Canal towards Broadway and was immediately befuddled by the large number of business people that far up at that close to nine am. I realized everyone was staring south. I kept moving. As I approached the intersection of Canal and Broadway, I saw the smoke. i still passed it all off as a fire, and continued to get my breakfast. Medium coffee, dark two sugars, Cinnamon raisin bagel with cream cheese off the roach coach.
I took my ear buds out to order.
I hear the voices all around me, I had just missed the second plane hitting and everyone knew now what was happening. In the three minutes I walked around the corner, it had officially gone from accident to what we all now know happened. I remember feeling like I was drowning, like I could not ingest the information fast enough to breath and move. My friend and my coworker Evelyn took the train through WTC every morning. I grabbed by food and bolted up the stairs panicked.
She was in the office already. She was laying down. She was screaming and crying and she was hurt. She had fallen running. She had seen more that morning then anyone should ever have to see. But she was ok and in my sight so I could move forward with the next tasks at hand.
My boss was headed to DC for a meeting, co-workers in Philadelphia. I couldnt reach anyone. Someone from my office announced "we are under attack." The news was coming so fast - and every time me and my co-workers looked south things were getting worse. We made phone calls. I spoke to my boyfriend at the time online. His father worked at WTC. He was believed to not be there when the event happened but no one could locate him. I called my family. They asked me to come home.
Then the Internet died. Then the phones. Then the cell phones.
We discussed a plan of action. One of us lived in Brooklyn, one Manhattan, Eve and I in the Bronx. We listened to the news. We all sat and I smoked right there in the office which no one cared about. It was then that the news radio said it appeared the first of the two towers was collapsing. We all turned to look out the window.
It looked like paper. Just millions and millions pieces of paper - fell towards us. It did not look like a building exploded or collapsed. But gently avalanched down. A gigantic crest of paper swooping in all directions. And then there was just the smoke. The dust. the Silence.
I decided things would only be getting worse and I advised everyone to make there way to safety away from our office. As we exiting the building, men in black were coming in. They were on rooftops everywhere. Evelyn and I began our walk North. To get from Canal Street to Grand Central where we had heard trains were eventually going to run. We walked fast at first, but everything was exhausting. This quiet parade of people in shock. I smoked. I drank a can of coke which I held onto like a security blanket. We watched fighter planes pass above us, shuddering in their shadows. We saw city buses filled with military men and women, wishing they could just take us home.
I dont know how long we walked. I know right before we got to grand central station we saw a billboard for citibank that read
"your most vulnerable moment will not be spent behind your desk".
We entered grand central and learned the LAST metro north was leaving for the immediate future. We ran down the stairs, and managed to get into the train. We couldn't believe we made it. For once, no one was rude, or uncomfortable by how packed it was.
I made it home that day. At some point. Only to find out the rest of what had happened, and my boyfriend's father was still missing. He would go on missing. and has never been found. He was supposed to be at an outside meeting, but went to the office to get something. He died in an elevator car with several other people ,after it free-fell and crashed, but he did not die from the impact of the fall, from what people who survived by squeezing out of the car say....this is where he stayed behind while they left to get help. The building collapsed as they were exiting and sending help his way.
Evelyn and I never discussed this in advance but we both threw away the clothes we wore that day. She wore a flower dress and construction boots. I wore a tee shirt, and faded grey jeans. And my plaid converse. We threw them away. Both of us.
For days, I had the sound of sirens stuck in my head when I closed my eyes to sleep. It was like tinnitus, but sirens. This is when I started my awful habit of always sleeping with a radio or TV on.
I don't know what I learned from all of this. I eventually came to learn we were never safe at all, and our number was up. Realizing all the years of my life, that at any time this could have happened, helped me cope. I was scared like everyone else in the weeks and months and years to follow. I asked my close friends to at least not let the media to make me out to be some brilliant, book loving, good Samaritan girl and use my graduation picture on the cover of the newspaper if it ever did happen.
The only thing I have learned, is how much I really did love my life before. Before the check points, the armed military at my train stations, the terror of seeing white powder anywhere, or smelling any strange smell in a subway, which pretty much is impossible. How i could take an elevator and not hyperventilate. To carry a backpack and not be subject to searches. To just walk through Manhattan and not feel like the whole world might just fall on you at any moment. To not have witnessed and lived through and dealt with quite intimately with my boyfriend and his family and the loss - a tremendous one - all the while it being an event that changed the way the world spins for years and years to come (and still to come). To not completely collapse in fear when the black out came in 2003. To drive across a bridge, and not panic when you hit traffic. When my daughter yells..."Look Mommy, an airplane!" ...I want to respond enthusiastically "Yes, IT IS!". I cannot. I usually say nothing at all. I see something different when I look to the sky. Every single day.
I had thought that I stopped loving NYC when my friend was murdered there, in the place we had both loved and enjoyed so much, but that was not the case at all. Matter of fact, I really had maybe just started to feel alive again when the attack happened. I just know, my new york is gone now, for so many reasons, physical and mental. Stores have closed up. Clubs have closed up. I think that all the people, who were really free, just like I was free, re-treated that day, enough to leave the city to complete change.
I still have fun. But my years of fearless abandon ended with this. So if I learned anything, it is that freedom is a state of mind for me more than anything. Freedom to me is having nothing to fear, Nothing to mind out of the corner of my eye. At least nothing like being blown to smithereens at a concert. I was always street smart, but terrorist smart - that's a stretch.
I don't mind having to have my background checked to fly. That is not my freedom. I don't mind my computer being monitored or what books I take out of the library. That is not my freedom. My freedom was in my heart. It was the innocence and aloofness (or what was left of it) I felt before September 11th 2011. The girl walking blindly to work with her headphones on so loud, a half asleep skip in her step, wanting her coffee, not looking over her shoulder, who quite literally could not hear a bomb explode. This was my life at it's charmed best.
