anniversary

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I was on my way to the World Trade Center. I worked at a coffee shop as a waitress on the ground floor of 4 WTC, right between the two giants. I ate my breakfast in the plaza every morning before school (I studied theater at Pace University, a few blocks away). That fateful morning, I was supposed to be up and at ‘em early to go get my paycheck and chit chat about picking up some extra shifts, as I was woefully low on cash. I’d just moved into a shitty railroad apartment in Brooklyn and was finding it hard to make ends meet.

I overslept. I’d like to say it was “fate”, except I overslept an awful lot when I was that age. My laziness was my salvation, when normally it is my undoing.

I was nineteen years old, six days shy of my twentieth birthday. I was wearing a red Playboy bunny shirt (classy), my favorite jeans, powder blue Sketchers, and a bandana. I was in an uncharacteristically good mood. I got to the train and the subway wasn’t running. A woman told me a plane had hit the World Trade Center. People were crying. I didn’t understand what the big deal was. I thought some idiot in a Cessna had forgotten to pull up on his stick. When I got out of the subway station, I saw a huge ball of fire in the sky and lots of smoke. I later realized I saw the second plane hit, since you could see the tippy top of the towers from where I lived.

I started crying.

I called my mom.

We all know how it went down. I was lucky. I was in Brooklyn, safe but scared, with two kittens and (thank god) several bottles of wine. I had no idea if my friends, classmates, and professors were alive or dead. I was able to talk to people on the phone. A really nice police officer walked me to the bodega, where I bought two packs of Marlboro Lights and smoked every last one of them. I was alone all day until my roommate finally came home, also safe but scared, at 6 pm. He’d had to walk back to Gowanus from the UN. I finally heard from my Pace friends, one by one. My friend Diana had wound up at some stranger’s house. All she did on the phone was scream and cry. My friends all survived, but they’d gone through stuff that a lot of them still can’t talk about. A lot of them lived in my old dorm, where I’d lived for two years, which was a half a block from the south tower. They ran from the collapsing building, not daring to look behind them. Still, though, we were all lucky.

My coworkers were also okay. Some had injuries from falling glass. One guy had to get 56 stitches on his shoulder. They all had to run through the plaza to safety, dodging falling debris, fire, and people. One of my coworkers was nearly hit by a falling body. He started working at another branch of the restaurant with me a few months later. When he told me the story of what he saw, he had to excuse himself to vomit.

We started school again less than two weeks later. I will never forget seeing the wreckage for the first time. I came up out of the subway and walked down Broadway as far as they’d let me. I could not believe what I was seeing. If you never saw it, you cannot imagine what it looked like. The smell was beyond description. I still can’t get it out of my nose. I came home with that smell on my clothes for months. I walked with my friend to her dorm near the Towers and helped her get some stuff out of there to bring to her new dorm. The apartment – the same one I had lived in my freshman year – was covered in thick dust. Some of the windows were broken and there were papers scattered on the floor. The apartment, which used to be dark from the shadows of the buildings, was now bathed in golden beams of sunlight. The shafts of light sparkled with dust, that ubiquitous dust we all breathed in for god knows how long (and is going to give us god-knows-what kind of cancer later on). It was ghostly, eerie. I felt like I’d wandered into some post-apocalyptic science fiction film. None of it ever seemed entirely real. Hyper-real, if anything.

It was hard. It’s still hard. I didn’t lose anyone, but so many did.

I don’t know if it was coincidence, but that semester was when I started writing again after not writing for a very long time. I went back to dealing with life the only way I knew how. I wrote a play that semester, and that’s when my playwriting career really began. It’s funny how it took such a huge thing to make me realize where I was supposed to be all along. I suppose the simplest things are the hardest to find in life, and it takes big moments to reveal small truths. Life would be easier if that weren’t true.

Ten years later, all I can say is that I hate everything that we have become because of it, and it is because of that I do not want to assign the event more weight than it should have. That is not meant to minimize the deaths, the heartbreak, or the terror we all felt; it was, as Jon Stewart called it, an “unendurable pain”. Those things are heavy and terrible and those are the things we will never ever entirely heal from, as a city or as a country. What I do not want to do is make more of the tragedy than it is, to elevate it in the grand scheme of tragedies that have happened before and since. Yes, three thousand people died. Yes, we had the shit scared out of us. Yes, there’s still a missing spot on the New York City skyline that I stare at whenever I see it, in the same way you stare at a wayward mole on someone’s upper lip, that way of not wanting to look at it but being unable to see anything else. However, the world spins regardless. Many have died since, in terrible ways not fit for waking imagination, and many will die after. People have decided to embrace racism, nationalism, and fascism. The dark underside of America has shown itself to more formidable than I could have imagined. There will continue to be hatred and violence and war. There will continue to be organized religion, and so long as that blight on modern civilization still exists, there will be bloodshed in the name of Jesus Christ, Allah, Yahweh, Xenu, Zeus, whatever deity we dare to give a name.

None of it makes any sense; what came before it, the event itself, and what’s happened after. The only solace I take from that terrible time is the brief moment where New Yorkers came together and rallied, and many musicians, actors and public figures stepped up to encourage and soothe a scared, tired city.

A week or so after 9/11, Tori Amos (one of my favorite musicians) went on David Letterman and performed her cover of “Time” by Tom Waits. This performance moved Dave to tears, and it moved me as well. It was a moment of grace and poignancy in a week of utter madness for which I will always be grateful. I actually met Tori that same week at a signing at the now-defunct Virgin Megastore in Union Square, and she was so very kind to me at a moment where I needed kindness. I waited in line for hours and hours, during which time I saw a group of men verbally harass a Muslim woman in the street; a harbinger of things to come. When it was my turn, I went up to Tori and immediately burst into tears, the CD I brought for her to sign shaking in my hands. I had lost my job, my city was burning, and all seemed lost. She took both my hands and looked straight into my eyes and said, “New Yorkers are so, so strong, and you are too, and you’re going to be okay”.

She was right.

I will share that performance with you now, and let this be my conclusion – art, in all its many forms, is a salve for all wounds. It is not frivolous like Sarah Palin would like us to believe (if I didn’t hate her so much, I’d feel sorry for her for being so empty). It is life. It is essential. It is all things beautiful about being human. It’s a comfort to know that we will continue to create – to make things out of sounds and words and colors and textiles and clay and rock and paper and steel – even when things come crashing down.