September

The light changes in September. When I get to midtown in the morning, the sun is often so bright to the east that even sunglasses don’t reduce the glare, which dances off the Chrysler Building and reflects back onto the masses headed to work.

The weather has turned - our humid summer has finally faded. A lot of us refer to this weather as “9/11 weather”. It has weight to it. That feeling of hope and possibility that September once brought now brings something else. The little bite of chill in the early morning air brings us back. We cast our eyes up and see that clear, bright September blue. We can argue about the shade - I’d say cobalt, some would say cerulean, some would say aquamarine, some might say manganese - but we all know what blue we mean.¹

That blue.

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This month marks my 25th anniversary of living in New York. I moved into student housing in 1999, two weeks away from my 18th birthday, less than two blocks from the South Tower of the World Trade Center. I forget all the time that I’m in my 40s, until my body reminds me. It’s been a quarter century, after all.

I loved New York from the second I arrived. I think that my ADHD gave me a strange advantage. What most people find destabilizing about the city - the pace, the randomness, the energy - actually stabilized me. No two days here are the same. Every day there is something new to see. I got my dopamine from the novelty of it all, which was not on the menu in the town I grew up in. Granted, I could have done without a few of the novel events I have experienced here, but mostly, it’s been good to me.

This is not to say that my time in New York has been easy. You can say a lot of things about living here, but “easy” ain’t one of them. It’s loud, it’s expensive, it’s relentless. It’s tried to kill me, more than once. A bad day in New York is the worst kind of bad day.

As much as I love her, she can be a real bitch sometimes. Yes, New York City is definitely a woman. Suzanne Vega wrote a whole song about this.

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I had only been in New York for two years when 9/11 happened², 23 years ago today. The agony and fear has dulled over the decades into a quiet melancholy, thinking about how America had an opportunity to learn something from it all, to do better, and failed. Instead, the narrative became that New York was not Real America. “Never forget” turned into “fuck those people”.

9/11 changed the city, because the city had to change after that. You move forward, but you aren’t quite the same. But the truth is that nothing stays the same in New York. Ever. Never has. That’s part of it. That’s a part of living here. All of your favorite places will eventually close. All the people you love will eventually leave. The things that made the New York you fell in love with will change, and you need to learn to love her all over again. Some people can’t. I guess I have had to change so many times in the past 25 years that I can’t fault the city for changing, too.

The play I finished last fall - called The World I Have Known - is about a family grieving someone they lost on 9/11. It’s not just about that - it is about America and delusion and conspiracy theories and COVID and how they all intertwine. I didn’t make it easy on myself. In the end, it’s really my love letter to New York, and my small way of honoring our collective grief. In one monologue in the play, a character who used to work at the World Trade Center is reflecting:

CLARA: That’s where I used to sit and drink my coffee in the morning before going into the office. There was always a guy feeding the pigeons, and when he tossed them pieces of bread, they’d all flap around in ecstasy. Sometimes there would be a live performance at lunchtime. You could see Alvin Ailey’s company, or chamber music, or salsa. Sometimes I’d just watch everyone heading into work, all walking quickly, and with purpose, but rarely bumping into each other. Just this silent dance, and everyone knows all the steps.

But none of it is actually gone. It’s all still here. Underground. With the office drones, the security guards. The firefighters. The subway. With the Dutch. The Native Americans. We just keep building on top of it. Stacking layers.

Underneath our streets, the dead are everywhere. The arch in Washington Square Park sits atop a former potter’s field - a place where the poor and unknown were buried. Some 22,000 bodies lie underneath the feet of the new batch of college kids, fresh faced and exuberant, the way I was when I first got here. Bryant Park was a potter’s field too, though they moved the bodies before building on it. The graves of Native Americans have, until very recently, been built over by developers.

In the case of the dead at the World Trade Center, they were given a proper resting place, even if not even a follicle of hair or a fragment of bone was found. Nearly three thousand people, many never found. Two great footprints left behind to say “we were here, we will always be here”.

The memorial is a beautiful, tasteful, and serene place. I do not go down there very often. It will always feel just a bit too strange to me, because somewhere in time, in the exact spot the tourists are standing in, I can see my younger self, sitting in the plaza, writing in her journal. I can see exactly where everything used to be. Whenever I find myself near there, a moment comes where it feels too much, and I take my leave.

I didn’t know how to end this post, but I found a poem I wrote, ages ago. It does not have a title. I don’t know when I wrote it, exactly. It was last modified in Google Drive in 2019, but who knows. It feels right today.

thousands of my selves 
refracted in a thousand lights
dispersed throughout the avenues
down the streets and in the windows and the signs
of carpet stores and bodegas
diluted, watered down, half-measured
weak coffee 
watercolor sunrise through clouds

and then a glimpse of her, all alive
no blurred edges, sharp focus, full color
I chase her down the subway stairs 
I want to tell her that there is so much more to live for now
but what was good back then was so good
so she’s gone downtown 
to when and where the towers still stand
and the record stores are still open

i am left to chase my disparate selves
trapped in corners and park benches
in the bottoms of vodka martinis and coffees
in the haze of hundreds of cigarettes smoked 
in greasy diners writing in notebooks 

just like that I am back in the here and the now
but a distant bell continues to toll 
echoing through the hole in the sky
and the place where the footprints
eternally fill with water
but never become oceans

I leave you with this video of Tori Amos’ performance of “Time” by Tom Waits - which aired on September 18, 2001. She was the first musical guest on Letterman after 9/11. I watch it only once, at the same time, every year. My prayer is always this when I share it: may it bring comfort to anyone who may need it, for whatever reason, the way it has for me.

1. The urge to write “its not turquoise, its not lapis, its CERULEAN” was intense

2. I wrote about my experience here. I was very lucky.