Today, I conducted my morning routine as usual - wake up (a bit late today), throw on clothes and head to the living room. From there I make toast, coffee and turn on NY1. For those unawares, NY1 is essentially a CNN (news all day) specifically for the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut areas. It's pretty great. Every half hour I get top stories, traffic and weather before I head out the door. It's a quick and easy way to check that the world didn't end while I was asleep.
Walking to work, I realized it was a crisp, coolly beautiful, autumn Tuesday, just like the September 11th of 2001. Back then, I was a sophomore in college, watching my campus and the world around me slow to a stunned stop. It's strange to think the kids in junior high now only know this way of living - knowing what a "terrorist" is before you turn ten. Never thought the world would change so irreparably when I was only 19 years old. But now, it's been over a decade, and the NY Times this morning raised some interesting questions over the choices of several communities to scale back in their remembrance ceremonies. After 10 years, is it appropriate to move into more personal expressions of grief, or do we continue with the bigger ceremonies? I'm of two minds on the matter. I understand private grief. Many times I feel like the poster girl for it. And it is important to have a certain measure of solitude and self-reflection, to think upon what this experience has meant to you. There comes a time when we must simply accept that something horrible happened, and move forward. However, I also understand that we as a nation should never forget those who died...not just in the towers, or the pentagon, the downed flight. We should continue to honor the first responders, and the soliders who were deployed to war so soon after. An entire generation was rocked. We can't possibly push that into the backs of our minds. Nor should we.
Heavy stuff. Moving Forward. Damn you! Why do you keep coming back to slap me in the face with your wisdom?!? And why are you so much harder to do than I ever imagined?
My friend, whose life is essentially a non-stop Tequila party, brought a magazine to my desk this morning...with Bob Dylan on the cover. And although it was such a nice thing to do, my heart completely sank. P loves Bob Dylan. Adores and reveres him. There were more pictures of Bob Dylan in our home than there were of us. That's how much. Just looking at Dylan's craggy old face, I thought "Fuck You." Which is totally illogical. But I felt it anyways. And I missed P so damn much. Still. We were together this time last year. It just sucks. It sucks a whole lot. I have, for the most part, let go of this. I don't cry anymore. But I hurt. I mourn, privately.
I found this later today. It felt right after the fact...
"How easily you now live without me; how awkwardly and clumsily and foolishly I live without you. The pain, anyhow, is past. To love you without hope or expectation feels expansive. There is nothing that I need from you, nothing you can say or do in response to it – only know that there is nothing about you that I find unlovely. That I cherish you, deeply and profoundly and without reservation. That you should exist in this world – that I should have been with you – seems like an extravagant gift, one for which I am forever and unutterably grateful."