10 years

reprinted from 2 years ago.....

It has been a long time coming. I have tried many times to put black markings on paper about this event that so deeply touched me....usually I use other people's words and images, who have been more successful than I in summing things up. So here it is....the 8th 10th anniversary of a really fucking bad day for many of us, and I am finally ready to unleash it. And it is self-indulgent drivel, if you want my honest opinion. There is no point and it has no end, sort of like the health care debate....can any real conclusion or final assessment be drawn? If you'd rather read something much more interesting and sure to draw copious tears to your hardened heart, and I sure wouldn't blame you, please see Brian Doyle's exquisite and gut wrenching piece Leap (in fact go read it anyway - it is much better than what I wrote below)

So, anyway.....before September 11th, writing had always been a joy. I was always jotting down ideas and making notes, culling my journal and email for little tid bits to develop - the process of creating something with words felt cathartic and liberating. It was so easy to spew my scattered, incomprehensible thoughts out of my fingertips as words, and stories and poems (and not just in English), typing or scribbling faster than I could think, onto paper, sometimes sending them away, far away - sometimes for someone else to read, and sometimes NOT, to burn, to bury, to delete, to fold up and tuck into my journal...it always helped when I was down or sad or upset and even when it wasn't emotional diarrhea, I enjoyed it immensely, and I loved sharing it with my friends and family.

But then came that awful day, and the spewing sputtered. An emotional earthquake rocked my foundations, and I erected this giant dike in my head, and around my heart and my words stopped coming so freely. After being called unAmerican for voicing my liberal opinion by certain narrow minded people in my family, I stopped wanting to share ANYTHING with ANYONE. I stopped contributing to the diabetes support group I had always followed, I stopped writing long letters during lunch,I stopped writing silly poems. Things and feelings and thoughts and emotions and even actions were choked back, tucked away, hidden, stuffed into the back corners. Words literally failed me, and writing was no longer the outlet it had always been, it no longer made sense and it didn't feel right. I couldn't say anything appropriate or reasonable, and really, the bottom line was, who cared anyway?

As the years pass, I will pull my finger out of the dam every so often, and let out a little trickle of emotional fodder to create something for my "blog about nothing," about life, my life, the world, but I have always ached to have something of my own to say about the whole overwhelming, nonsensical specter that was/is September 11th. (And please don't call it "nine eleven" around me - that is "shorthand," something the media concocted to make it catchy...It's a Fraternity, not a Frat, it's your country, not a cunt, and god damn it, it is September 11th, not 9/11).

After that day, in the days and weeks that followed, I burrowed in. It was a long time before I really communicated with anyone, and I mean “communication” on every conceivable level. Sure, at the time there were plenty of mechanical phone conversations and shallow email exchanges. Friends offering heartening words, asking concerned questions but nothing, no one, really scratched through the veneer of my stiff upper lip and my “getting back to usual” appearance. “Oh, I am OK,” I said, “I had an acquaintance or two who worked at the restaurant, but no one I knew really well (I found out later I was wrong)...just taking it day by day.” but I was NOT taking it day by day. I did not take it at all...it was taking me. For ages, I felt like I was being crushed by an enormous weight! I wrote,

It (what is “it?” is it grief? pain? sadness?) washes over and through and around me, surrounds me and sucks me down; drowning me in a bottomless sea of sadness and loneliness! I hate my job, I love my job; I hate New York; I love New York; I miss my family; I don’t want anything to do with my family - all they do is die and get sick or make me feel bad that I can’t (won’t) do more for them. I have no one to talk to, not that I WANT to talk to anyone, no one to listen to me, not that I have anything to say. No where to pour my heart and soul and fears and tears and whines and complaints, and the few small joys when they dare to raise their little heads, as if I would be able to vocalize or physicalize them, as if there really was a heart or soul alive in me anymore and the longer I go, the deader I feel...walking into a frozen fjord, growing number and colder with every step. No one to slap me out of this silly little mood, if that is what I need, nothing to physically, mentally divert my attentions...I have never felt so isolated and lost and small.

Everyone I knew was half a world away, a million miles for what it was worth, with their own lives, jobs, work, email backload, children, pets, car troubles, health concerns etc. and could do nothing to help, save, guide, steer me, I knew that; not that I would take help or saving or guiding or steering from anyone without grievous argument.

I was always a barely-controlled sniveling basket case of scar tissue, snot and blood, but after September 11th, I had to fight even harder to keep that blubbering little worm under wraps. In the weeks before that day, I was surrounded by family and friends in Texas and Colorado, I frolicked in the Canyonlands and drove my purple car 90 miles an hour across Arizona, with the wind tangling my hair into befuddled little snarls, the skin on my arms golden brown, the wrinkle between my eyes all but gone. By the end of September, it was back, and deeper than ever...my skin paled until it was as colorless as my soul, and my first grey hairs appeared. I became a phantom on the subway to work, a ghost on the sidewalk, walking through Times Square, with all the other shadows. We all wept on occasion. In this ashen world, did we finally really see each other? Instead of protecting personal space on the train, you could almost feel the person next to you leaning in, drawing support and warmth from your own broken and fragile body....as tears rolled silently down my face, I felt a hand touch my arm....but even so, I was so terribly alone.

I left New York in June, seeking purpose, and more creative opportunities, to find a real relationship with a man, to drive my car and get my stuff out of storage. I like to imagine I am better now. I no longer dwell on the events of the day, try not to conjure up the pictures etched on the back of my closed eyelids, for when I do, I remember that I have only a fragile grasp on control, and even that is held together by the tenuous threads of my logical mind. My irrational mind still wants to let go and fall. I still want to peel my grasping fingers loose and let my soul take flight. I still want to scream, I want to hit and hurt. I want to scratch my fingers down something soft and yielding, I want to bite down HARD and feel the blood spurt in my throat as something gives in my teeth. I have this caged animal inside of me that is clawing to escape and it is a struggle to keep it quiet. Ice, I tell myself. I am ice, Ice is hard and cold. Ice feels no pain, nor sorrow or anger or fear. Ice needs no fire to survive, and indeed, maybe my internal fire needs to be doused so I will feel less sad, less anger, fear no more, and the bruises of loneliness will heal.

2001 was a dreadful year for my family in general - I lost more family members in the 6 months before and after September 11th than in the rest of my life combined. And even so, I can't forget the thousands of people in those buildings and on the planes! Looking out the windows as they approached the end, snuffed out like birthday candles - poof - now you see em...now you don’t - they were cremated alive - pulverized into dust before their hearts stopped beating, before their voices finished shrieking - and the ones who jumped from towers - I can never ever forget that. At least Granny had a chance to say good bye; at least Aunt Sue got to tell everyone "I TOLD you I was sick," before she died....Which way is better, I wonder....I still wonder

Sigh....all things end, everything dies, a new day will come tomorrow, a new threat, a new fear, and I will continue to hold back - There is no summary, no nice tidy resolution here. I have not come to any pithy realization or found a great soul searing revelation. But at least some of the garbage I have been carrying around in my head for the last 8 years is OUT of me now. Maybe now, the water can flow more easily. My writing always began with good intentions, though I was rarely able to make a good conclusion, but perhaps that IS the conclusion. The end just IS, you can't predict or plan or devise the end. Maybe this isn't the end, and maybe a day will come when I can more adequately express what I am trying to say.....for now, I will just remember to keep trying to remember why life is so damn important and all the economic woes and health care crises and the financial meltdown and the car repair stuff, and the ruins of my latest relationship, and every thing else, really don't matter.