The weight does not lift itself, although over time it lightens. Sometimes we need to push. And sometimes that is very hard.
It is still strange to see the skyline. I have never seen an absence that’s so physical. It’s possible I will see the absence for the rest of my life, even when there is something else there. Which is okay. The thing to remember when looking at an absence is that you are standing outside of it.
We still feel some things in common. And we still feel some things that are entirely our own. I can only say what I’m feeling, and even that is only the fraction that I can articulate at any given moment. I still have those childish moments when I wish with all my heart that I could wake up and find it’s all been a dream. I really have thought that. I have felt—stronger than grief, stronger than anger, stronger than despair—the profound desire to return to the netherworld of the safer past. There are still the flashes of unexpected sadness, the pauses that last longer than they used to. The desire for retribution, the fear of retribution. Like a death in the family, like a personal tragedy, an event like this lays bare the complexity of our worlds, internal and external.
But you can’t live life in the shadow of all that. I think about the posters, how they went in a matter of days from posters of the missing to posters of the missed. Eventually they were taken down. Gone is not forgotten, but our lives cannot be a memorial. This city cannot be a memorial. This city has to be a city. Our lives have to be our lives.
The swim of things. I go on an airplane. I walk under the Empire State Building. I take the bus, and the subway, and am surrounded by strangers the whole time. I certainly have room in my life for caution, but I have no room in my life for paralyzing fear. There’s always a risk. There always has been. But I’d rather live my life than die of negations.
There is not one moment when that feeling of inadequate sorrow goes away. It just lessens and lessens, until it is mostly a memory of itself.
We live in the same apartment. I go to the same school. I apply to college. I get into college.
Somehow, six months pass.
I’m not at home when they light the lights.
I’m at school, finishing up our environmental club newsletter. I’m the last one there besides the janitors, and it’s dark out when I finally leave. It’s March 11 and I have been aware of the anniversary all day, but I still gasp when I look downtown and see the beam of blue light coming from where the towers used to be. I feel such a silence pass through me. Ghosts.
I know what I have to do. And suddenly it’s the opposite of that day. Because instead of walking away, I am walking toward. Instead of taking my brother’s hand and heading north of Fourteenth Street, I am alone and heading home. The towers have been resurrected as spirits, and I am going to visit them. In the chilly night-darkness, they are their own beacon. All I have to do is go down the street and face the right way. There they are. Alighting over the tops of the SoHo buildings. Hiding behind streetlamp glare, arching over our heads. I keep walking. I keep following. Past Canal Street. Past Duane.
I still find it hard to see Ground Zero. I still find it hard to witness the nothingness. The lights are not a remedy for this. There will never be a remedy for this. But they are a strikingly apt presence. They are both something and nothing at once. They fill the space without claiming it as their own. They are translucent. They blur.
I walk down the nearly empty West Side Highway. I walk past Stuyvesant, toward the pedestrian bridge we all saw on TV that day. I think of turning back. I’m not sure I can do it. I have been so good about getting back to normal, about moving on, about forgetting enough so the pain doesn’t keep me awake, but remembering enough so that I am a different, better person. The lights keep drawing me on. Because I know that in a short time they will be gone. And I know I have to experience them before they disappear.
I reach the base. It’s not at Ground Zero—it’s a few blocks over, surrounded by offices that were untouched that day. You can see the buildings right through the lights. Each beam is made of dozens of singular rays that seem, at the bottom, entirely like the latticework of the towers. There are not many people at the base—mostly families, the children running around as if they’re at a playground, a light show. I don’t mind their laughter or their chatter; it’s a nice juxtaposition against the size of the moment, like having a baby make noise at a funeral. I face skyward, tracing the intersection of seeming parallels. Light like specters and souls and geometry. Towers of lights of towers.
I walk to the edge of the lights and see Ground Zero, see Century 21. I could just go home. I could call it a night.
But something about the lights has emboldened me. I head west. Frightened.
This is something I haven’t told anyone. Not Peter. Not my mom. Not Jasper. Even though I pass by Ground Zero almost every day, I still have been too afraid to go to Rockefeller Park. It’s a small stretch of park along the Hudson, and it’s always been one of my favorite places in New York, one of those magical corners that you feel is your own even though you share it with thousands of people. I knew it wasn’t part of Ground Zero—I knew it was probably okay—but still I hadn’t tried to see it. I hadn’t wanted to see it any different, was afraid I would find it cordoned off or shifted over to rubble. When buildings collapse, why respect a park?
But tonight it’s time. I walk around Stuyvesant. I turn the corner. I hold my breath. I look. And it’s still there. Every railing. Every step. Everything.
When I hit the water’s edge, I turn south, toward the plaza. Because seeing the park … seeing the Jersey ferry dock … suddenly I know what I have to find. My favorite piece, the railing directly outside the World Financial Center, the one inscribed with a quote from Walt Whitman and a quote from Frank O’Hara—quotes I have not been able to remember. I’ve only been able to remember how much I loved them. I have always loved them, always made a point to walk by them, always assumed they’d always be there. And since 9/11, I’d assumed they’d been destroyed in everything that had happened.
As I turn to walk south, I am sure in my bones that the railings won’t be there. As I walk closer, I think it might be possible that they’ve survived. As I turn and see the Financial Center’s plaza, hurt but still standing, I think it’s very possible, but still I can’t believe it. Nearer and nearer. I see part of it is blocked off. Then I can see it. Right there. And I am so happy and so sad at the same time. I am exuberant and despondent and utterly, completely beside myself. There they are. And I know it’s ridiculous—with so many dead, so much destroyed that I can feel so much joy over a series of metal letters affixed to a metal railing. Life ends, and life goes on. Words disappear, and words remain. I can stand along the water as an orchestra of wind envelops me. I can feel the same things I used to feel as this happened, and I can feel other things ghostlike beside them. I can look to the skyline, and where I once saw twin towers, I can now see twin lights. I cannot begin to understand how this works.
I write the railing quotes on the back of an envelope, so I will never lose them again.
CITY OF THE WORLD (FOR ALL RACES ARE HERE, ALL THE LANDS OF THE EARTH MAKE CONTRIBUTIONS HERE), CITY OF THE SEA! CITY OF WHARVES AND STORES—CITY OF TALL FACADES OF MARBLE AND IRON! PROUD AND PASSIONATE CITY—METTLESOME, MAD, EXTRAVAGANT CITY!
—WALT WHITMAN
ONE NEED NEVER LEAVE THE CONFINES OF NEW YORK TO GET ALL THE GREENERY ONE WISHES—I CAN’T EVEN ENJOY A BLADE OF GRASS UNLESS I KNOW THERE’S A SUBWAY HANDY OR A RECORD STORE OR SOME OTHER SIGN THAT PEOPLE DO NOT TOTALLY REGRET LIFE.
—FRANK O’HARA
AFTER
(Part Five)
A REUNION
Peter
Even though I know they’ve kept in touch, it doesn’t occur to me that Jasper will be at Claire’s birthday party. But here he is, looking both hot and sheepish when he sees me. Our email exchange trickled to nothing in the fall, and I honestly never thought I’d see him again. Or if I did, I didn’t think it would be like this, with me all nervous and wondering what to do.
Claire must know this, because she comes over and says, “Here, I’ll try to make it less awkward.” And the sweet thing about Claire is that she’s wrong about half the time when it comes to social interactions, but she’s well intentioned and kind-hearted enough that you don’t really mind; if anything, you try to bend the situation to meet her intentions, so she won’t be disappointed.
“I believe you two know each other,” she says, dragging me over.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” I say.
It’s not like I think of him often. If anything, he’s just this weird romantic-but-not-really footnote to a really big milestone.
He’s just come in, and he hands Claire an elaborately wrapped present.
“You don’t have to open it now,” he says.
“I’m opening it now,” she replies, not tearing into the paper as much as unfolding it. There are many layers—and I realize what he’s done. Each layer is the front page of a Monday newspaper, so with each layer Claire peels back, she’s going back a week. May. April. March.
There’s an envelope at the center—a photo envelope from CVS.
“I didn’t take them myself,” he says. “But one of my friends was here for break, and he took them, and I thought you’d want to have them. To remember.”
The photos are of the lights. Some shaky, some crystal clear. Some up close so you can see every beam, and some from far away—Brooklyn or Jersey—so you see the blue shoot up from the skyline.
“Oh, Jasper,” Claire says, hugging him. And even I want to tell him that he’s done a good job. I doubt she’ll like my birthday present (another mix, Eighteen Songs for Eighteen Years) half as much.
More people come in, and Claire needs to be social. Her little brother is answering the door, dressed in a shirt and tie—a regular gentleman, unlike the rest of us.
Why is it so awkward? We shared one night—two, if you count Mitchell’s party. It shouldn’t matter to see him. It should be fine.
“So how’ve you been?” Jasper asks. His hair is a little longer in the front. There’s no reason Claire would’ve told me that.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Good.”
We fall into the usual conversational pattern—he asks me where I’m going in the fall, and I tell him which school, and he says it’s only an hour from his school, and I don’t know what to say to that, so he quickly says he has friends at my school and that they all love it there.
“What are you doing for the summer?” I ask him.
“I’m actually going to Korea for a couple of months,” he tells me. “I’m trying to brush up on my international relations. Plus, my grandmother keeps almost-dying on us, so my mom and I are going to stay with her for a while. I used to dread the three weeks we went in the summer, and now I’m going for nine weeks. Go figure. And what about you? What are you doing this summer?”
I shrug. “Hanging around here mostly. Saying goodbye. Getting ready for school. Claire’s dragging me down to Arkansas to build houses for a week. But other than that, I’m around.”