(no subject)
I am not normally a very sentimental person, but the news here is all about the five year anniversary of 9/11, so given the relentless poking in-between properly escapist television programs, my gears started turning to some cloudy and speculative country and I asked Katherine a question that probably surprised her.
"What would it have been like, if I had gone to work that day? You would probably have just gotten past it and I would have been another guy you dated, right?"
"I wouldn't have just gotten past it. It would have been hard for me, I think."
On 9/11/01 Katherine and I had been going out for a little more than a month. She had to fly to California or somewhere and I wasn't feeling well, so I stayed home (her home), sitting the dog. I did not go to work that day, which may have saved my life... but honestly probably didn't (New Yorkers all like to recount their near-misses, though). We have pictures of people from the office where I worked in 2001, covered in gray soot like some kind of ashen abominable snowmen, and a woman I work with today cracked an ankle with her harrowing leap onto a departing Staten Island Ferry. Downtown was the apocalypse. Things like this don't happen in America, let alone the capital city of the world. People didn't know what to do, and the tsunami-like waves of human flesh were as terrifying as the falling Towers and copious soot. My best friend growing up told me about the surreal race -- a race against the thousands of other human bodies -- north, north to some arbitrarily "safe" place somewhere in the West Village. It was a Tom Clancy novel, not New York.
Sequestered in Katherine's Upper West Side apartment, I didn't know what to do or how to feel so I mostly just watched television and held Frank. Likely I logged in to Neutral Ground or some other Magic sites on her dial-up connection and Mac. Katherine was stranded in Queens, which was not the worst place in the world to be stranded, besides the hotels and similar businesses going out of their way to exploit the chaos, besides being so near and yet isolated from her home, from Frank, from me. People come together in times like 9/11 so she paid the overnight hotel bill for herself and some kind of penniless and lovely mail order catalog-looking Australian couple (he looked like Ben Affleck and she looked like any of the innumerable blond goddesses you see peering into any magazine or turning on any television channel). The Australians suspected that they had the last ever footage from on top of the Towers. They loved each other fiercely on 9/11 and decided they were going to join in Katherine's decision after she announced that she was going to give into her crazy boyfriend's matrimonial advances. The Australians broke up shortly after returning home.
After a day of confusion and watching bad television and not feeling well and probably eating a lot of take-out Chinese, I heard Katherine ring the bell. I don't remember why, but she didn't have her keys. Frank went crazy but I assured him that it was just mommy. I carried him to the door, and Katherine was standing there, sobbing with her hand up and about to rap on the wood. "Two things," she said as I found her on the welcome mat. "First of all, I think they're all dead. All of my clients in the Towers, I think they're all dead... and YES."
It turned out that all of her clients actually got out, but YES, we figured life was too short and got married a few months later. I had been bugging her since maybe our second weekend together, but Katherine continually assured me I was tragically inexperienced or perhaps just insane (secretly she had decided we were going to get married after our first date). Last night she turned it around on me.
"What about me? What if I had been the one to die? Would you have immediately gotten over it? You wanted to marry me!"
"Probably you would have become one of my stories. I think I'd tell everyone that we were probably going to get married, the first girl I ever loved, and hence the one that got away... but that we'd never know."
She and I had only been seeing each other for a month at the time. Cough. Cough. Wah! From the other end of the hallway, our allegedly sleeping daughter demanded additional bedtime milk.
"What would it have been like, if I had gone to work that day? You would probably have just gotten past it and I would have been another guy you dated, right?"
"I wouldn't have just gotten past it. It would have been hard for me, I think."
On 9/11/01 Katherine and I had been going out for a little more than a month. She had to fly to California or somewhere and I wasn't feeling well, so I stayed home (her home), sitting the dog. I did not go to work that day, which may have saved my life... but honestly probably didn't (New Yorkers all like to recount their near-misses, though). We have pictures of people from the office where I worked in 2001, covered in gray soot like some kind of ashen abominable snowmen, and a woman I work with today cracked an ankle with her harrowing leap onto a departing Staten Island Ferry. Downtown was the apocalypse. Things like this don't happen in America, let alone the capital city of the world. People didn't know what to do, and the tsunami-like waves of human flesh were as terrifying as the falling Towers and copious soot. My best friend growing up told me about the surreal race -- a race against the thousands of other human bodies -- north, north to some arbitrarily "safe" place somewhere in the West Village. It was a Tom Clancy novel, not New York.
Sequestered in Katherine's Upper West Side apartment, I didn't know what to do or how to feel so I mostly just watched television and held Frank. Likely I logged in to Neutral Ground or some other Magic sites on her dial-up connection and Mac. Katherine was stranded in Queens, which was not the worst place in the world to be stranded, besides the hotels and similar businesses going out of their way to exploit the chaos, besides being so near and yet isolated from her home, from Frank, from me. People come together in times like 9/11 so she paid the overnight hotel bill for herself and some kind of penniless and lovely mail order catalog-looking Australian couple (he looked like Ben Affleck and she looked like any of the innumerable blond goddesses you see peering into any magazine or turning on any television channel). The Australians suspected that they had the last ever footage from on top of the Towers. They loved each other fiercely on 9/11 and decided they were going to join in Katherine's decision after she announced that she was going to give into her crazy boyfriend's matrimonial advances. The Australians broke up shortly after returning home.
After a day of confusion and watching bad television and not feeling well and probably eating a lot of take-out Chinese, I heard Katherine ring the bell. I don't remember why, but she didn't have her keys. Frank went crazy but I assured him that it was just mommy. I carried him to the door, and Katherine was standing there, sobbing with her hand up and about to rap on the wood. "Two things," she said as I found her on the welcome mat. "First of all, I think they're all dead. All of my clients in the Towers, I think they're all dead... and YES."
It turned out that all of her clients actually got out, but YES, we figured life was too short and got married a few months later. I had been bugging her since maybe our second weekend together, but Katherine continually assured me I was tragically inexperienced or perhaps just insane (secretly she had decided we were going to get married after our first date). Last night she turned it around on me.
"What about me? What if I had been the one to die? Would you have immediately gotten over it? You wanted to marry me!"
"Probably you would have become one of my stories. I think I'd tell everyone that we were probably going to get married, the first girl I ever loved, and hence the one that got away... but that we'd never know."
She and I had only been seeing each other for a month at the time. Cough. Cough. Wah! From the other end of the hallway, our allegedly sleeping daughter demanded additional bedtime milk.