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Walking to the World Trade Center
Feb. 9th, 2005 12:08 amToday after work I was to meet Ernie in downtown Jersey City - we used to live there, we still have a favorite restaurant there - Saigon Cafe on Jersey Ave just east of Newark, you won't have a better meal in Jersey City and the owners are delightful. It's not so much vietnamese as good food cooked by really good cooks who happen to be vietnamese.
To get there I had to walk across lower Manhattan to the site of the World Trade Center. I have only been over there a couple of times since 9/11, the day that found me in the last train coming into the WTC before they started sending them back, seeing billowing flames and running burning people down the hallway I normally walk, and going outside to see a huge burning hole in the side of the building where the first plane hit. Standing there stupidly looking up in some sort of "this is not real" state until the person/body jumped/fell and landed where I could see him, and after storing away that lesson in what humans look like when they fall that far and hit concrete I started to move towards my office on the other side of Lower Manhattan on Wall St. I kept stopping and looking back, stopping and looking back. What could have caused this? How big was the hole? How many floors? What I didn't expect was what happened next, with another plane slamming into the other building, a huge cloud of fire billowing out from the other side (my side) just like everyone saw on television, and a rain of debris and body parts showering down, with me on the edge of it and an arm with a wedding ring on one of the fingers landing near me. Something hit me, I don't remember what and I don't want to know.
I ran.
I still work down there, in the same building. I hadn't been back in the pit since they rebuilt the PATH station and it's creepily similar, with the 2 levels of banks of escalators leading down to the trains.
I was was in full horror-film-flashback mode, with scenes from the morning, later that morning, leaving the office trying to breathe through a wet napkin, shaky cellphone calls to my mother and Ernie, wandering up to the village and having lunch, and finding my friend Bill who took me back to his apartment until the PATH trains were running again and I could get home, all those over the most mundane and familiar reality of riding the PATH through exchange place to Grove St.
I got off the train at Grove and coming up the escalator I had two distinct thoughts: the first was coming up the escalator on 9/11 and realizing I was almost home and some value of safe, walking the couple of blocks to the apartment and falling sobbing into Ernie's arms. The second was all the time after that day where I knew that I was loved and cherished and safe and starting a very important phase in my life, and how much the time in that apartment, before we bought one-house-then-another, was a good time for me. And the house-after-house, is all good to this day.
Life sorts out, I think. If I can survive one thing then I can enjoy the next, and the pain diminishes and leaves the glow of happiness. Sometimes it's good to go back over old territory to realize how little hold it actually has anymore.
I don't know if it's just imagination, but I still see/feel a swirling cloud of over that site that feels like loss and confusion and fear. Only in a highly woo-woo moment do I admit to myself what I think it is, partially because it's too awful to comprehend.
To get there I had to walk across lower Manhattan to the site of the World Trade Center. I have only been over there a couple of times since 9/11, the day that found me in the last train coming into the WTC before they started sending them back, seeing billowing flames and running burning people down the hallway I normally walk, and going outside to see a huge burning hole in the side of the building where the first plane hit. Standing there stupidly looking up in some sort of "this is not real" state until the person/body jumped/fell and landed where I could see him, and after storing away that lesson in what humans look like when they fall that far and hit concrete I started to move towards my office on the other side of Lower Manhattan on Wall St. I kept stopping and looking back, stopping and looking back. What could have caused this? How big was the hole? How many floors? What I didn't expect was what happened next, with another plane slamming into the other building, a huge cloud of fire billowing out from the other side (my side) just like everyone saw on television, and a rain of debris and body parts showering down, with me on the edge of it and an arm with a wedding ring on one of the fingers landing near me. Something hit me, I don't remember what and I don't want to know.
I ran.
I still work down there, in the same building. I hadn't been back in the pit since they rebuilt the PATH station and it's creepily similar, with the 2 levels of banks of escalators leading down to the trains.
I was was in full horror-film-flashback mode, with scenes from the morning, later that morning, leaving the office trying to breathe through a wet napkin, shaky cellphone calls to my mother and Ernie, wandering up to the village and having lunch, and finding my friend Bill who took me back to his apartment until the PATH trains were running again and I could get home, all those over the most mundane and familiar reality of riding the PATH through exchange place to Grove St.
I got off the train at Grove and coming up the escalator I had two distinct thoughts: the first was coming up the escalator on 9/11 and realizing I was almost home and some value of safe, walking the couple of blocks to the apartment and falling sobbing into Ernie's arms. The second was all the time after that day where I knew that I was loved and cherished and safe and starting a very important phase in my life, and how much the time in that apartment, before we bought one-house-then-another, was a good time for me. And the house-after-house, is all good to this day.
Life sorts out, I think. If I can survive one thing then I can enjoy the next, and the pain diminishes and leaves the glow of happiness. Sometimes it's good to go back over old territory to realize how little hold it actually has anymore.
I don't know if it's just imagination, but I still see/feel a swirling cloud of
