I remember wishing that I could feel more.
10 years seems too long ago. Living in our apartment in Portsmouth–just north of Boston, having just quit my full time job to be a freelance designer. I wish now that I hadn’t procrastinated that morning and wasn’t in my bathrobe when the 2nd plane hit. I stayed in it for most of the day. I was so far away. There was nothing I could do. I still feel helpless when I think about it. Because, just like every other American, I remember every second of that day.
My best friend had just moved to Los Angeles, and I had just flown back from seeing her. I had driven there with her, across the country and the feeling of this great land was still fresh in my mind. I returned via Logan Airport in Boston where flight 11 took off from. Could it have been the same plane? Later I learned that the pilot was from a neighboring town, Stratham, NH. I called my Mom. Panicked. My Dad was in New York City — in another trophy building, nonetheless. He had an office in the Twin Towers too. What were the chances? I called and called with the lines going nowhere — my Mom — My Dad’s office. Finally my Mom called me. He was fine.
I called Bill — my now husband, at work. I called my friend in California. I called my Mom again. I couldn’t stop calling people — eyes glued to the television. Why? Tears pouring down my face. No. Not happening. I threw up. The day went on and I thought of everyone I knew that might have been killed. Hurt. Annie, my sister, called me from Australia where she was studying abroad. She was so displaced and didn’t understand — I told her that I didn’t either. They said it was terrorism. Everything was going to change and everyone everywhere was effected.
Later that night I drank too much wine. The news media had become too much. Someone mentioned a possible threat on the Empire State Building and I lost my mind. My Dad was still in the city — only blocks away. My head started spinning and I called my Mom again. She insisted that I not let them–the media, get to me. I breathed through it, standing against the wall in our kitchen, crying. Our neighbors upstairs were playing guitars out on the deck and I started to think that I had no business in taking the attacks personally. Some of the parents of my sister Kate’s classmates (then in high school) were among the missing… Simply not returning on the train home from work. I thought about the car accident that I was in several years before — one that left me with slight PTSD and the loss of feeling in most of my right hand. The ambulance ride. The paramedics. The smell of I-95 encrusted on my clothing. It should have been a fatal accident but we were spared by the Guardian Angels sitting on our laps. I tried my hardest to imagine what it must have been like to be in New York City, the Pentagon or on one of the planes but I couldn’t come close, and as I stare at the scar the car accident left on my hand, I still can’t. Bill and I couldn’t sleep, despite the alcohol. We agreed to not watch the television except for one or two hours from that point forward, a plan that lasted for about ten minutes.
A woman I knew through work was on the plane from Boston. We had only met once during a meeting a few months before at my old job. I had heard that she quit her job as well and was going back to California, where she was from. I barely knew her, and yet suddenly she became a fixture in my mind. She was simply trying to go home.
I didn’t want to be in New York, but I didn’t want to be where I was in New Hampshire either. I was blessed with not losing loved ones. But I couldn’t help thinking that if I could just feel what it is like to be witnessing all of this terror firsthand, then I might be able to understand. Then I might be able to find some kind of juxtaposition in fate and how things happen to other people while the rest of us just watch. There’s just a little something pathetic feeling about having to remember that day and how removed I was while so many were suffering. How the varying degrees of how each individual was effected found me way out in the spectrum of barely touched. Because that’s most of what I remember — the feeling, and how I didn’t think that I was feeling enough for the enormity of the situation, which may never end.
