Last year...
Sep. 11th, 2002 04:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
creidyladLast year I woke up and Chris called me to tell me he was okay. Ten minutes later there were shouts from upstairs as my neighbors saw the second plane hit. I watched in edgy worry, feeling the baby in my belly, until the towers collapsed. Then I knew I couldn't be alone. My neighbors invited me upstairs, so I went, and spent the day with them. Like other New Yorkers, we were busy trying to locate our loved ones, finding people in downtown places to go for the night, breathing a sigh of relief at every friend and acquaintance who checked in to say they were OK.
In the weeks that followed, after the ash had settled and most of the smell had dissipated, the candles still stayed on the street corner, lit every night, renewed, with flags and peace symbols. The neighborhood still took food and donations to the local fire station (which had been one of the first on the scene).
We were a community. We looked into each others' eyes and felt our bonds through our grief. There was so much grief...
I miss them, miss Park Slope, miss my neighbors, miss the familiar faces on the street, miss the shopkeepers who had become part of my daily routine.
And missing them helps me not to think about American Express and my time there, and all the people I knew for a day or a week or a year while I was temping all over the WTC and WFC, all the people who could have been caught in the collapse or the flying debris or trapped above where the plane hit, people whose faces I saw plastered on 'Missing' ads for months every time I went to the doctor for a checkup during the pregnancy. Helps me not to think about all the tears I'd shed every time I had to use the payphone across the street from NYU, where the missing posters were plastered in an overlapping papier mache in sight of the place where the forensic teams were sorting dead body parts.
I can't make sense of any of this today. Working in those buildings, we always knew this was coming, every since the first attempt. Knew it either as a passing joke or a sick dread or a pit in our stomachs. I would think every day, "I can't keep working here; I must leave this place," and I did. I fled, leaving behind not just my fear but the disgust I felt at the swarms of faceless, grey-clad drones marching toward the subway every day. There was an old woman who stood at the exit from the overpass every day, where everyone leaving the WFC and heading into the WTC passed by. She could have been mine or anyone else's grandmother, and her incessant cry was, "Please help me, I'm so hungry." I would often stop at a fast food joint and bring her back something to eat, and she always looked dumbfounded and grateful. Not once did I see anyone else stop.
So there it all is, mixed in, unresolved, milling about in my mind and my heart and here I am, sure that it's not over, that hate isn't dead in the world, that New York is still a target. And I'm thinking, I need to get my daughter out.
In the weeks that followed, after the ash had settled and most of the smell had dissipated, the candles still stayed on the street corner, lit every night, renewed, with flags and peace symbols. The neighborhood still took food and donations to the local fire station (which had been one of the first on the scene).
We were a community. We looked into each others' eyes and felt our bonds through our grief. There was so much grief...
I miss them, miss Park Slope, miss my neighbors, miss the familiar faces on the street, miss the shopkeepers who had become part of my daily routine.
And missing them helps me not to think about American Express and my time there, and all the people I knew for a day or a week or a year while I was temping all over the WTC and WFC, all the people who could have been caught in the collapse or the flying debris or trapped above where the plane hit, people whose faces I saw plastered on 'Missing' ads for months every time I went to the doctor for a checkup during the pregnancy. Helps me not to think about all the tears I'd shed every time I had to use the payphone across the street from NYU, where the missing posters were plastered in an overlapping papier mache in sight of the place where the forensic teams were sorting dead body parts.
I can't make sense of any of this today. Working in those buildings, we always knew this was coming, every since the first attempt. Knew it either as a passing joke or a sick dread or a pit in our stomachs. I would think every day, "I can't keep working here; I must leave this place," and I did. I fled, leaving behind not just my fear but the disgust I felt at the swarms of faceless, grey-clad drones marching toward the subway every day. There was an old woman who stood at the exit from the overpass every day, where everyone leaving the WFC and heading into the WTC passed by. She could have been mine or anyone else's grandmother, and her incessant cry was, "Please help me, I'm so hungry." I would often stop at a fast food joint and bring her back something to eat, and she always looked dumbfounded and grateful. Not once did I see anyone else stop.
So there it all is, mixed in, unresolved, milling about in my mind and my heart and here I am, sure that it's not over, that hate isn't dead in the world, that New York is still a target. And I'm thinking, I need to get my daughter out.
