9/11
The day after the "Debate"
I was in New York on 9/11. I lived in Windsor Terrace. I have a story about realizing that the second plane had hit, and that it wasn’t an accident. I’m not going to tell it.
One of my friend’s stepsisters died. One of my friend’s brothers died. Another friend of mine had an uncle who owned a business, and a large amount of his staff died. My Pilates teacher had a friend whose husband died. I was not connected to anyone else who died.
For the first week or two following the attack, I was drunk if I was awake. All my friends were. There’s not a lot to say about it. We just couldn’t deal. I really could not deal. I would wake up and just start crying. I hadn’t gone to therapy for a while, but I went and spent the session screaming about how the United States was going to get all of us fucking killed because they were such fucking assholes to everybody. I was like can’t we fucking stop this fucking country that we live in from being such fucking assholes. It turns out that the answer was no. I thought my therapist was sympathetic but he just did a good job of pretending because I read something years later that he wrote about 9/11 in the New York Times and I don’t think that we had the same perspective on it.
My nervous system absolutely refused to settle itself. I saw danger on every corner. I wouldn’t take the subway. Every time I drove over one of the bridges in a taxi, I would close my eyes until it was over and well up with tears once we were no longer on the bridge because I felt like I had just survived a brush with death.
Whenever they raised the terror threat to orange or red in the months that followed, I would be unable to concentrate until they lowered it again. I can’t believe I thought that was an actual barometer of anything. I would like to thank all the people I know who stayed friends with me through that time and I would especially like to thank the people who chose to start new friendships with me. I was so paranoid and I took a lot of Klonipin and acted weird for about a year and a half until I finally stopped feeling in danger of being killed. It’s embarrassing.
When I think now about how scared I was, particularly that first day, the white-hot terror, the shimmering unreality, the desperate wish to have it all be not true, to have not had all those people die so close to me, I think about the Palestinian people living in Gaza, and now the West Bank. It’s been a year of 9/11 every single day of killing, killing, killing, without clean water or food, in the cold, in the heat. They don’t get years to recover from “being really freaked out” and knowing some people who knew people who died. They don’t even get days or hours. The fear, the death, the hunger and thirst and dirty water, the sorrow, the rage, the frustration, the anger, the loss, the pain, the no legs, the no arms, the no more mother and father, no more child or best friend or wife or entire family goes on all day every day. Not only that but as it goes on and on they must watch the world doing nothing to stop it and vilifying anyone who fights back on their behalf. They have to wander around scared carrying their starving kids knowing that last night the two people vying to be the figurehead of the country that is paying a lot of money for everyone they know and love, including possibly themselves, to die, had a televised conversation and they barely even discussed the matter, and when they did, it was just to say that it was all going to keep going.
For the 98% of the conversation where they did not talk about Israel’s right to murder Palestinians, each tried to reassure Americans they were the candidate who could foster the most hospitable environment to ensure dominance, murder and exploitation continue around the world, of Palestinians, but also of whoever else.
I was too stupid and too sure my feelings reflected how things were when I was 31 to process 9/11 as something that was mostly going to happen to other people, far away. I understood some things but it would be a number of years before recognition of the U.S. as a violent empire became the grounding premise of my reality. Watching the debate last night, I wasn’t thinking about the safety of our democracy. I was thinking about the safety of live human beings. Much will be written about what happened on that stage last night, but I just saw two killers, and you better believe that’s all a lot of the rest of the world saw too.
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