(no subject)
It was a beautiful day, just like today...
but by this time... everything had changed forever.
From Sept. 11, 2005...
On Friday night - I caught a glimpse. Just a glimpse of a 9/11 movie. Enough of a glimpse to see a shot of the 1st building burning at just the moment the plane smashed into the second building. And in that glimpse I was back on a NJ Transit bus, curving around the loop/helix on the New Jersey side heading into work in Secaucus NJ… in that glimpse I was back on that bus watching a plane crash into the WTC.
My neighborhood was under attack… my beloved beacon… the twin towers… the light that always led me home… the light that had been there since the year of my birth. My neighborhood was under attack… how would I get home... when would i see my baby again… was my mother under those buildings as she told me that morning she would be... were there remnants of my lovelife in those buildings... My neighborhood was under attack.
The twin towers used to be my playground. Every weekend I walked through the caverns under the ground & through the river to grandparents’ house we go. As a child I had lain down on those cracks in the courtyard created by King Kong. As a teen-ager I had watched cute boys skateboard about before being chased away by rent-a-cops & Port Authority police both. As a young adult, I had both worked there and lived, loved, laughed there. As a deeply immersed 20something year old, i felt so good that morning, having just voted in my local primary & dropping my beautiful baby off at the babysitter & being ON TIME to work because goddammit Michael Jordan was coming out of retirement for the second time.
I walked to the train station on shady Madison Street… Madison Street was always shaded by the strength of the World Trade Center’s height… I walked & looked at the twin towers giving off their early morning golden glow. I walked & I thought “god… how beautiful are those buildings?”
I have seen pictures of my mother and her brothers in their youth. Pictures of them living loving & laughing around Lower Manhattan… A lower Manhattan that had no World Trade Center… and those pictures always looked so foreign & broken. Where was that?
I see those pictures now & I see a city as broken & foreign as I am. Where is that?
Where are those people from my neighborhood that I don’t see around anymore?
Where am I?