Sunday, September 11, 2016

What I Wrote and What I Did Not Write 15 Years Ago


What I wrote:


No drinking for one week
Buy CD burner and make music
Work on book
Read
See movies
Get in touch with people
Get some culture
Go to Boston?
Convert foreign currency
Get Tux
Buy wedding present

I woke up, I decided not to go to Marie Claire, I wrote this, I wrote Charles an email, I got an email from Michou telling me the World Trade Center was on fire.  And it was.  The day was spent watching television reports, speaking to Wellington about the latest television reports, and sending and receiving emails.  I seem to have a little cold.  I look forward to going to bed.  What will New York/the country/the world be like tomorrow?  I, at least, will be better rested.

What I did not write:

I couldn't call out of the city.
I couldn't leave the city.
At a point in the afternoon I asked Wellington if he thought it was safe to go out.
When I went out, to my corner deli, there was a stream of business people walking up Eighth Avenue from the financial district.
Then I walked over to Seventh Avenue and saw a doctor I knew standing outside of St. Vincent's with his colleagues. A group of medical professionals on the sidewalk. I asked what was up. He said, "We're waiting for patients, but there aren't any."

What I wrote:

The television has become too much.  The conspicuous displays of anger, patriotism, somberness, hope, and spirituality.  The emotionalism of it all, on camera.  It seems false even when it isn’t false.  

What I did not write:

I went back to the corner deli the next day and they had pasted a handwritten note to the door: "We love America!" For the years that I had lived on Jane Street, it never occurred to me to wonder where these men were from, let alone what they thought about America. I figured they liked their prime spot in the Village, and the trade from people like me who were too lazy to walk to a nicer place a block further for cranberry juice.

What I wrote:

It’s been glorious all weekend, cool and cloudless, sunny, pristine, which has made my malaise that much more noticeable.  We’re to prepare for a long war – one year, two – and that seems like just one more reason to leave New York.  The airlines are laying off substantial proportions of their personnel, which, coupled with seriously enhanced security measures, isn’t promising for air travel.  And the “downturn in the economy” that the Republican administration has been battling with tax refunds and interest-rate cuts is now beside the point, given that a terrorist attack seems to have been all that was necessary to throw us into a recession.  I’ve been reading Joan Didion, but this seems, well, rather convenient.  

What I did not write:

The most beautiful weather I've ever experienced anywhere was in New York City that week.
There was a system of stops (I called it a quarantine) and I lived below the first.  When Wellington would come over I had to go to 14th Street and show police my ID to get him "in."

What I wrote:

Me, I’m lonely.  I wonder how long I’ve been lonely.  Was I lonely in Europe?  I don’t think so.  Probably from the moment Mark closed the door on the possibility of continuing to be boyfriends... Even if I didn’t think we’d manage it, I must have had it in my mind that we might.  And I came back without any positive experiences of the romantic kind to draw upon, and found none, of course, here.

What I did not write:

Because of the cordoning off, there was no traffic, and everyone you saw lived in the Village. It was so quiet, which was in its way my ideal New York. Strangers said hello.
I had gone to a dance party (hah!) in Brussels that summer, and made out with the handsomest man, a German-American with inexplicably bad English. He was in New York that week and couldn't get out.  I met him for dinner and took him to my friend's comedy show. He was nicer than I remembered and had a very loud laugh.

What I wrote:
 
Adam Gopnik says that the real message of the Auden poem everyone is reading in the wake of the bombing has to do with seeing things clearly and speaking the truth.  

What I did not write:

Susan Sontag wrote the best, the truest thing that anyone had to say about that day. 
For three months, I saw missing persons fliers taped to the ugly walls of St. Vincent's and kitschy sad memorials hung on the fence across from it.
For three months, I saw smoke at the end of Sixth and Seventh Avenues, and smelled that smell (breathed that acrid electric air).
For three months, and much much longer, my friends and I rejected any notion that we had gone through something. We did not feel scared, we did not make plans to leave New York, we did not reassess our lives. God knows, we felt no pride for merely having been there. 

I do wish that people would stop saying "9/11."  That was television branding even then, and given what's come from that day, and the days after, and the months and years that followed, it is an intolerable shorthand.

1 comment:

  1. C'mon already. Sept 11, 2016, nothing since?

    ReplyDelete