Twenty.
Twenty. It’s such a significant number. Weighty. It seems to symbolize some change, transition, or growth. On this day, today, it means adults, full adults are remembering a day they weren’t there for or don’t actually remember. That’s the strangest thing about today. How can it be a whole person ago but still feel so much like yesterday? How can it also feel like a time lost when time hasn’t stopped? Time is funny.
Like so many of us, I remember every detail of that day. I often flashback to everything before and after that day almost like a hazy dream. I think about the just being in complete shock at what I was seeing and hearing on my pocket walkman on Z100. I remember thinking about my parents, my brother, my friends, and probably some guy who I can’t remember now. I remember working in midtown in 2001, in a new job after having been laid off during the dot com bubble burst from my super cool job downtown in the Financial District. It was supposed to be a temporary stop to where I’m not sure, but I knew it was temporary. I was there for eight years and while it profoundly changed my life in many ways, it also feels like a relic of that time. There will never be a job or work like that again, just like our lives will never be like it was before that day in September. See, nothing was the same again. Time is really funny.
I’ve been thinking a lot about grief lately as well, and how we grieve and remember together. The days that followed that day in 2001 there was this shared grief all around us in the daily memorials, in the pictures posted around town, the sharing of stories, the smell of ashes and fire wafting throughout the city. Twenty years later this day has not, will not get easier. I naively thought it might, but we choose to remember. I sit and watch the reading of the names every year. The names, some the same age as I was then and would be as me now if they were here today. I listen to the bells toll at 8:46am, 9:03am, 9:59am, 10:03am, and 10:28am. It’s still heartbreaking but there is comfort in sharing it with so many.
But, grief is also weighty. We spend so much time trying to “get through” or “get past” it, I wonder if sometimes we forget to just sit in it and with it. It’s too heavy to carry so why not sit next to it.
I think about all we’ve lost in the last year and half and the deep pain so many of us are still in. After 9/11 we didn’t talk about mental health the way we do today, even though we needed to, but we did hold each other close. It seemed like the only thing to do. We definitely talk more about mental health now, which is progress, but fight sometimes to the death about a piece of cloth covering our faces in a way we never did about taking off our jackets, shoes, and being patted down when traveling. Time is funny. Humanity is funny.
I wonder if the grief is too much. The last 20 years have taken so much from so many of us. Maybe we’ve hit a wall. I’d like to think we’re better than that but I don’t know. It’s strange to remember this day, to mourn loss as we are in the midst of continued pain and loss. Ten years ago, I wrote about my extra ordinary life and five years ago, about my unending love for this city, and today, 20 years later, while I still love my very ordinary life and New York City, I wish we loved each other as much as we did then. Now, I’m not looking at this through rose-colored glasses. We have never been perfect at loving each other, not now, not then, but I do hope we remember to try. We seemed to be better at trying. But again, time is funny.
Time seems to exist in high contrast grainy pictures with smiling faces seemingly without a care in the world, in music, and obscure places we walked past. I feel this every time I come across an old picture, hear that Moody Blues song (you know the song), or walk into a restaurant in New York and say, “I know I’ve been here before when it was…” There are ghosts everywhere and all those pictures and smiles take on a different color when we look back.
I don’t know if this happens to you, but sometimes I’ll come across an email that I wrote or was sent to me from years ago and it’s like I’m reading about someone else because I can’t believe I wrote that or that happened. That’s how I feel about that day. It’s a discovery every year yet strangely familiar.
I remember feeling excited about everything 20 years ago. I was in my 20s so that was kind of part of the job. It was a beautiful, bright, crisp, sunny day, not unlike today. I miss everything before that, I miss me, I miss us, but I am also hopeful about what is ahead even though I will be weeping, seemingly never ending tears, all day today. So, even though you’re 20 years old today, I’m still going to hold you, all of you, like I would have that day and hope that we do more of that in the days that come.
New York or Nowhere.
