TheExpatJournals.com

I lived in the city for a decade, but after a crippling divorce two years ago, I moved away from the only place that ever felt like home. I refused to go back for a visit because I knew I wouldn’t want to leave and feared I might not. And I needed the time away. I finally did go back on September 5th after moving my son to school in Boston.

On September 11^th, a friend phoned from the street to confirm going with me to see Roger Clemens win his 20th that night since rain had deprived us of the privilege on the 10^th. She looked up and said, “Oh my God, the World Trade Center is on fire! Turn on the TV!” I was just above Houston in the Village and had heard the first plane, making a mental note of how unusually low it sounded. Local news still didn’t know why it was on fire. Then they said it was a plane. We hung up.

I watched live as the second plane hit, heard the explosion outside and knew. I went out and watched with others on the street. We crowded around cars with radios cranked. I felt numb. I could only think, “Those planes had people on them.” I walked over to the West Side Highway. Everyone assumed the fire department would get things under control.

I still had binoculars and a camera in my bag from my trip to Yankee Stadium the evening before. So, I pulled out the camera and took pictures as though documenting would keep any feelings at bay. In a way, I felt like a ghoulish voyeur. In another way, I could escape reality somewhat by concentrating on taking the picture rather than taking in reality. My mind was racing and numb all at the same time. I knew I was witnessing history. I knew tragedy was unfolding before my very eyes. Through the lens, I could see the South Tower lilt at the top. I decided to go find my friend near her office. As I turned north at Houston, it hit me…”They’re gone.”

Once, a long time ago, I fell down, dislocated my elbow and crushed one of the bones which ended up being surgically removed. Immediately after the fall, I held my arm from just below the shoulder while the rest dangled. I felt nothing, no pain. That’s how it was that morning, emotional and mental shock blocking the obvious reality from sinking in.

Of all inane things, I kept wondering if I still needed to move my car for alternate side of the street parking. And it felt so ridiculous to even think of it. I approached a cop to ask. Instead I sobbed the question to him. I couldn’t help it and he understood. By this time, both towers were gone.

I had parked off Washington Square Park. I walked across Morton, turned onto Bleecker and across Cornelia to get there. A delivery van was parked on Cornelia with speakers blaring, but instead of news reports like everyone else, it was classical music. I thought he was trying to do his part to help us, to offer a bit of calm in the midst of it all. Though surreal in the setting, I was touched. The part of me that needed soothing was still unavailable. Nothing would help for awhile yet.

I couldn’t sleep more than 4 hours at night. That first night, the minute I closed my eyes, I saw flames shooting out of a building. I couldn’t eat. I never felt hungry. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t get through a whole movie or tv program. By Sunday, I had stopped watching the news. The posters outside. The smell. The pall. The beautiful, caring spirit as pervasive as the tragedy. Until Friday, we were cut off downtown from the rest of the world. Exactly why was it that I couldn’t come back to New York before now? And why am I supposed to be here for this?

It felt wrong to do anything normal. The personal stories you heard of unspeakable horror never made the news. The smell. The idyllic sense of bonding among friends in the immediate aftermath was never fully portrayed in any feature I saw or read. The smell. The posters of the dead and missing…the applause for the emergency workers heading north…the shrines that sprung up everywhere downtown…none of this could be reported with the same impact as experiencing it. I understood why men can’t talk about war. There’s some innate understanding that words will forever fail to accurately describe, so why try? It was like swimming in a sea of pain with no land in sight. It was the pendulum opposite of when words fail to describe the vastness of love…this was the vastness of pain and horror.

A friend phoned on Sunday after the attack. She asked how I was. I said, “I’m fine as long as I don’t go outside or turn on the TV.”

It took awhile before I could go to midtown without resenting the seemingly normal activity going on there. I remember walking east on 34^th Street beside Macy’s one day when a cavalcade of police cars, motorcycle cops and the ominous men-in-black official vehicles sped towards the Empire State Building on the next block. I calmly wondered where I should take cover if it went down, but my brain couldn’t respond. So I just kept moving forward like I had no choice, like it was my duty to go about my business as though all was normal.

I really didn’t experience fear beyond those first few moments when local media queried whether or not there were chemical bombs aboard the planes. I experienced a moment of wondering whether or not I was about to die. Watching Rudy and Pataki near Ground Zero without masks told me they knew no chemical bombs were aboard and the fear passed. When the initial reports of possibly 20,000 victims was first made public, I told a friend, “They’re telling us that so we will feel relief when it’s a lot less.”

Volunteering became the ultimate velvet rope. While it perhaps resulted in exactly what was needed, it was morally reprehensible. People suddenly ‘counted’ by how close they were to the scene and the victims. Volunteering became status. And as per normal in the city, that depended on who you knew or fluke timing. People wouldn’t leave Ground Zero for fear of not getting back in. It had little to do with helping out and a lot to do with ego. Not everyone fell into that category, but too many did.

I still couldn’t read, write, work, shop, eat, sleep or do anything normal. I literally couldn’t. I couldn’t even enjoy the Yankees anymore. I could barely focus on Clemen’s 20^th win. The night the Yankees returned to the city, I was there. I thought that if anything could capture my attention, the Yankees were it. A moment of silence in Yankee Stadium with 33,000 people, the Harlem Boys choir, the firemen and policemen lined up with the players, 9-11 images on the giant screen in the stadium, Challenger (the live eagle usually appearing only on opening day or in post-season…the big games) remaining grounded…whatever protection had been in place was shred to pieces after that. Clemens reached 3^rd on the all-time strike out list and the Yankees clinched the division title that night. I can’t go so far as to say it didn’t matter at all, but I can say it didn’t feel like it mattered.

I rarely cry. Most people I’ve known for decades have never or have very rarely seen me cry. I even have a trick if I’m inclined: If you roll your eyes upward towards the sky, it stops the tears. That night, I called the Red Cross around 3:00AM after hours of uncontrollable sobbing that I feared might never stop. I spoke with someone who had come in from the midwest and wasn’t a mental health worker. She was merely manning the mental health hotline. I could only cry at first and she tried to soothe while reminding me she wasn’t a therapist.

I needed to know why helicopters hadn’t attempted rooftop rescues on the North Tower and, like wondering whether or not I needed to move my parked car that morning, I simultaneously knew the question was simply my way of trying to focus on anything to provide a mental reprieve from the emotional abyss. I knew that even if there was an answer, it didn’t matter now. Still, the need to know the answer felt like the most important thing in the world right then. The Red Cross volunteer therapist said no one had asked that before. She referred me to another number that turned out to be a hospital’s psychiatric ward for emergencies–a recorded message. I hung up. I felt like a drama queen for calling in the first place. I judged my feelings petty in the face of those who had truly suffered losses.

When I left NYC at the end of September and returned to Asheville, NC, logic told me the healing could begin now that I was away from the ceaseless onslaught of heartache. And in a sense, that was true. But in another way, it was worse. I now found myself completely alone with the experience.

That first night back, I went into a grocery store, forgot what I was supposed to buy and burst into tears. I knew that if I were in the city, people would understand, but here, no one put two and two together. A few days later I was at an ATM that smelled hot, like an electrical fire. I felt an overwhelming compulsion to run away from that smell. I remembered how, after a few days, I would hurry past the downtown shrines knowing that to stop and allow them in would shred any of semblance of ‘okay’ I had achieved.

I could no longer be a shoulder for friends’ problems that now seemed so petty. Two days after my return, a friend called in a moment of ‘crisis’ to go on and on about how difficult her two year old was, the challenges with her new business, how her physician husband just didn’t offer the romance she needed, blah, blah, blah….nothing new, only the details change.

I tried to talk with her about what I had been through, but got nowhere as the conversation shifted right back to her. I got a cold as soon as I left NYC. She suggested that was to blame for my emotional woes, “because I know mine started when I got sick..” I cut her off with a spontaneous, though in retrospect embarassing, drama queen moment, “Mine started when I stood on the street and watched thousands of people die!” Silence. Then more about her. I mostly made long distance calls to NYC after that.

My closest friend in Asheville, TL Lang, tried to help by having me out to his peaceful mountaintop home. He cooked, rented movies and took care of me. I appreciated the love, but I still couldn’t even get through a whole movie. That first morning on his deck, having coffee and watching the hummingbirds with the Blue Ridge Mountains as a back drop was almost enough to make me feel a moment of peace. He lives on the property where the movie “28 Days” was filmed.

Finally I went to see a shrink, a post traumatic stress disorder specialist, because I couldn’t just move on. I couldn’t process. She was a waste of time, but that evening, the Red Cross sponsored a meeting with two therapists for anyone in the community who needed to address issues around 9-11. I was the only person who showed up two weeks in a row. It made a big difference. It was as though it was all bouncing off the ‘walls’ inside with nowhere to land. They helped it land. I hadn’t been able to allow myself to feel the pain inside. It seemed so wrong, as if I had no right, to feel this way when those around me lost so much more than I did. I imagined my own son in one of the Towers or planes and knew what the families were going through and knew my experience was nothing relative to that.

I used to live in Tribeca and my friends still do. They had all lost loved ones , were displaced and still seemed stronger than I felt. One friend who lived a couple of blocks away from the WTC was livid that he watched Bush’s visit on September 14th with binoculars from his roof and no one noticed. Being in the position to shoot the President of the US without anyone noticing is not exactly a step towards feeling secure again. He inappropriately joked about when it would be convenient to cry. He’ll cry when he feels safe…whenever that might be. In an odd way, being there for each other was the only way we had of balancing the horror settling into our psyches and therefore became almost a compulsive need. I wondered if now I had some inkling of the ‘bonds of war.’

I knew someone who had traded shifts with a co-worker at Windows On The World so he could stay out late Monday night without getting up early Tuesday morning. He lived across the street in Battery Park. He watched through binoculars. He lived close enough to see the faces of his co-workers as they jumped.

I knew someone who still couldn’t talk to anyone after escaping from the 91^nd floor of the north tower. I had someone grab my arm one day who just needed to unload. It turned out that he was a grief counselor at Ground Zero. I would run into doctors sobbing as they walked away from St. Vincents. People sobbing on the streets was as common as people walking dogs. There were days when the smoke was so thick that you had to bag your clothing as soon as you came inside lest it smell up the apartment.

Even as I was leaving the city, my driver overheard me on the phone. No matter where you were or who you were, everyone felt the need to talk about where they were when it happened. You didn’t have to ask, we all had to tell. He was no exception. As he spoke, tears rolled down his cheek. The man told me he had lived in the city for 14 years, but on October 14, he was leaving for the Dominican Republic. This man in his mid-thirties missed his mother. He wasn’t coming back to NYC. He told me he was parked in front of the North Tower when the plane hit. He was scheduled to take an executive to the airport. In a monotone he said, “The first man I saw jump was wearing a black suit.” He described what he saw and told me he got out of his car and just started walking north, walked all the way to the Bronx that day.

The smell. The smoke. The grief. The fear. The shock. The posters of the dead and missing everywhere. The shrines. The workers. The National Guard. The fighter pilots buzzing the city. Everyone in NYC being so nice and helpful and compassionate and kind. Everyone in NYC trusting anyone. And the empty sky …the empty sky…that hole in the sky said it all.

Sunday, December 2^nd, I was sitting in a friend’s living room having a conversation. There was a window behind her with only views of the sky. She lives near an airfield in Louisville, KY. As we were talking, suddenly a large plane sped diagonally across the view through the window. And I immediately started crying. And couldn’t talk about it. Silent or spewing are the only two modes I’ve known on this topic. I’m different now and there’s no turning back on that front….just moving on and, for me, moving back to the city.

I was right to sense that returning to NYC would render me unable to leave. It’s home. It’s the city I love. It’s the only place I’ve ever found ‘my tribe.’ New York is the ultimate Olympic moment manifest. It’s pure inspiration, motivation and creation. It’s the city of unlimited possibility with plenty of fuel to get you there. It’s not for everyone, but for some of us, anything else is settling. And New Yorkers don’t settle-they seek, they strive, they succeed.

I remember appreciating the fact that the rest of the country, so typically biased against New York, finally had a glimpse into what I already knew about New York. I also remember joking that this could be the only time in history that the rest of the country actually felt sorry for New York.

I never left…I just moved away. Within hours of returning, I knew it was time to come home. September 11^th didn’t change that for me. I would rather have been there than anywhere else. New Yorkers have a way of living in their own private worlds. For awhile anyway, we all lived in the same world…New York City. And then there’s the rest of the world. No, some things don’t change.

(Note: I have included this because 3 things were huge factors in my decision to leave the US: 9-11, the suicide of my friend TL in Jan. 02 and then finally, the day we bombed Iraq, something inside completely shifted. They were factors because of how they profoundly affected me internally.)