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September 11, 2006

September 11, 2001 (NYC)

I don't really have anything to say about 9/11 except that it was the one of the weirdest, most terrifying days of my life. I was living with a girlfriend I had recently broken up with (long, ugly story) and even as we were able to come together to get through the day, I spent 9/11 completely out of my head, cycling manically between fear, feelings of warm, encompassing forgiveness for my ex, and desperate prayers to god to please, please not let me die with that awful, despicable woman, don't let her be the last thing I ever see.

We were living in Brooklyn so we watched the whole thing on television or from a hill in Fort Green Park. My ex-girlfriend had a daughter and after the towers had fallen we decided to take her to the park. My ex was British and I attributed her desire to get out of the house to some gene acquired during the Blitz, some specific impulse to live one's life as one pleased when under horrific aerial assault. For a few minutes we were the only people outside. I felt a twinge of worry, a pang of social inappropriateness. Were we doing something wrong by laying a blanket out and reading to Joy while the world was coming down around us? A few minutes later the park was full of people talking, walking, crying and sitting. We hadn't been wrong at all, just a little early.

Even though we were both New Yorkers (me by birth and she by choice) and had been to the World Trade Center a dozen times, we didn't fully grasp the scale of what had happened until we went to the park and saw the plume of smoke with our own eyes. It was immense, it arced into the sky like a solid thing with structure and design as opposed to something insubstantial and windblown. Just before a friend called to urge us to put wet towels under our doors and to tape our windows against toxic fallout we had started to wonder if we could smell - what? A fire? Dust? Death? We went home, got lost in the details of making life as normal as possible for my ex's daughter. We joked about escaping to my family's in Haiti if civilization collapsed, and in darker moments I imagined, terrible, insane, selfish things, like taking Joy with me to safety and leaving her mother to just deserts - eaten by mutants, perhaps. I also imagined the two of us being bound together forever despite our mutual antipathy by the exigencies of post 9/11 parenting survival, and once or twice I imagined falling back in love, 9/11 transforming everything right down to the unstable molecules of our relationship. What happened instead is that we watched the news and a week later we took tentative steps back into the world. We did not have 9/11 sex. We retired to our separate bedrooms after Joy was asleep every night, our great ugly war temporarily in a state of externally imposed truce. We lay awake all night, vigilant, listening, alone.

I kept telling myself that I had escaped the worst of it, all of it really, until I had to take a subway for the first time. I was surprised to find I was terrified, that I could barely breathe. As I stood there pressed up against some or another stranger I stared at my feet trying to hold it together and stealing glances at the faces around me. I was looking at other people's eyes in hopes of being reassured by something there and what I mostly found were reflections. People were discretely looking at me, at everyone, all of us looking to be held down, looking for help in the suddenly pressing, endless work of maintaining our sanity, the work of not running screaming out onto the street at the next station. Even though it stood to reason it was strange and unexpected to discover that we all felt the same way. It was even stranger and more unexpected to realize we were all participating in the creation of a new class of American experience, something to do with inexplicably large horror and small, personal fear, with resolve and the willingness to share our literal vulnerability with our neighbors. In those first few days there was no one for us to kill in hopes of feeling any better, there was nothing for those most directly affected to do except survive and clean up, rebuild. To do the little things we did as a matter of course: go to work, go to school, sit in the park in the shade of a great cloud that may or may not be laced with death, reading to our children.

And that's it, really. It goes without saying that I believe that if the rest of the United States was like New York City we would not find ourselves in the predicament that we now face in Iraq, in Afghanistan, anywhere really. New York City is admittedly a liberal town, but I don't think it's a simple accident of place and political temperament that has the bulk of New Yorkers failing to see the relationship between what happened to them that day and the things our government and our countrymen have since done and said in the name of our unique losses. It's New York City; even as every passing year erases the array of textures and differences that make this far-flung nation unique, New Yorkers persist in living and understanding things a bit differently than our neighbors do, up to and including remembering what happened on September 11, 2001.

Posted by ebogjonson in memory, places, politricknal sciences, on September 11, 2006 2:07 PM