It was at least a bracket on which to construct memory and, more so, a place of departure—perhaps the wrong way, like an elbow bent backwards. It became context: a way to delineate and map New York’s, and my, existence.
It’s my A.D. she said. Yeah, everything is before or after. After is when it all started to go bad.
Did you loose someone? No, luckily. Not that day, but soon enough. At the time, I thought I could have lost anyone, everyone. Or I was lost, and others were mourning the loss. For some, close enough to the epicenter, all those in the falls were our loss, and, too, something that had been collectively all of ours before was now lost with them. Physical proximity can in part explain this discarnate connection between strangers, those remained and those gone; the ripple effect that dissipates as it moves outward from point of origin.
For weeks the smoke, ill-defined, crawled slowly out of lower Manhattan; crossing the East River onto Brooklyn, hanging in the sky over apartment buildings, like mine. Enmeshed with the afternoon sun of that clear day, the amalgam of the smoke and ash of paper and plane and body went on to hue the sunset a beautiful, if unnatural, charcoal-red blood orange.
This was from the
Writer’s Almanac last week.
D.H. Lawrence: 'Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.'
It was on this day in 2001 that two hijacked planes crashed into the Twin Towers in New York City.
