post-traumatic stress disorder (noun) : a severe anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to any event that results in psychological trauma
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So many writers have tried to put context around the September 11th of ten years ago, especially those based in NYC. Each piece recalls a different experience that somehow also feels similar – a sense of the world changing, a lack of words to express the grief and horror, a deep mourning for the loss of lives and of innocence and of the ordinary. Each piece brings back the emotions of that morning and of the days and weeks and months that followed, especially for those in the city, and most especially for those who lived and worked downtown.
I was fortunate (my brother still comments on how I seem to “dodge bullets”): a business trip placed me in Santa Fe, New Mexico that morning and not at my office across the street from the north tower. A colleague who was with me interrupted my morning yoga practice to tell me that a plane had hit one of the towers next to our building. She told me to turn on the television in my hotel room.
Like so many others, I watched the events unfold from very far away. I watched people (whom I likely passed on the WTC plaza every day) jump out of the flames and fall to their deaths. I watched the second plane hit the south tower and explode. I watched, while my friends and co-workers were running out of our building and running away from the destruction. I was still watching when each of the towers collapsed.
Even now I can’t describe how I felt, sitting in a peaceful hotel room in the desert on a beautiful day, just watching. I seemed not to be myself somehow – not in my body, not living this life. I believe that I tried to telephone family and friends and colleagues, many of whom I couldn’t reach, and many who told me later that they thought I’d been killed.
The days that followed blur together in a congealed memory of a cross-country drive with a friend who was stranded in Albuquerque. I remember that we met other groups of stranded travelers in rental cars at petrol stations. I remember we commented on seeing no planes overhead. At one of our rare stops for food, we watched the news and saw that my office building had been damaged and was at risk of collapsing. One newscaster commented on all the women’s dress shoes abandoned in the debris, and I thought of my own pairs of dress shoes in my office that might be joining them.
I remember dropping the car off somewhere in New Jersey but I don’t recall how we got into the city. I remember the bad smell of my neighborhood, the dust that covered everything and clouded the air, the hundreds of flyers of missing people posted on every corner, the memorial that sprung up in the park across from my local FDNY firehouse for the dozen or so men from the unit who had died performing their jobs that morning. I remember bringing the survivors from that unit a few six packs of beer (a tradition that I continued for years until they asked me to stop because they couldn’t accept it). I remember joining the crowds along the desolate West Side Highway to cheer the volunteers going to and from the WTC site as they passed. I remember commenting to my brother that we needed dust masks as we walked to the site to see it for ourselves. I remember that I didn’t return to that site until my office building re-opened ten months later, when it looked like just another NYC construction site.
I don’t remember talking about any of this with my therapist, nor ever thanking my friends across the world who left so many messages for me that it took several days to respond (there being no FB or Twitter at the time).
Ten years later, I live further downtown, even closer to the WTC site. I walk by it daily: I’ve watched the clean up, the opening of WTC#7, all the stages of the rebuilding of WTC#1 and #4, and the construction of the memorial park. Every day I maneuver around gawking tourists crowding the sidewalks to take photos. Lately I have stopped cursing them and simply make my way to the job. Each year since 2001, my September 11th edition of The New Yorker goes “missing” in the post. This year is the first year that I didn’t curse the USPS for absconding with it. Like the tourists, perhaps they just need to feel some connection to what happened.
I’ll be out of town again this September 11th. Many of my friends who used to live in New York have moved away, and I don’t see them very much. I am rarely in touch with the colleague who was with me in Santa Fe, and I don’t often see the friend who made the mad dash back home with me across the US in the rental car. But even though I don’t have much contact with them and other friends from that time, I am thinking of them all as I recall the only feeling that I remember from that time – love.
