April 2020: Indelible
I moved to New York City on August 26, 2001. My mother and father drove me to Manhattan so I could move into the dorms before classes started. There was a joke in my family that I’d been packed for college since the sixth grade. Before leaving, I neatly sorted all of the contents of my teenage bedroom into three piles: what to take, what to trash, and what I wanted to save in one long Tupperware under the bed. My idea of leaving was to make things as if I’d never lived there at all.
What happened next all of you know, because of the date, because of the calendar. Two weeks after moving to the city that I love the towers fell. What I remember of that time is piecemeal, some things indelible, other memories tamped down by trauma. We were so young. There was a boy who lived on the same floor I did in the dormitories who was also from the suburbs of Philadelphia. The morning of September 12th he knocked on my door and said he was going home to Philadelphia if I wanted to go, too. His aunt and niece lived in Battery Park City and she’d asked him to take his niece to Pennsylvania for the indefinite future, because we didn’t know then if we were at the beginning of a war. I told him that I would stay here, huddled in my dormitory, in a top bunk where I didn’t sleep but instead just listened the wailing sirens and felt numb. Not long after he left, I started to cry. I stood up from my desk and walked down the hall to tell him I had changed my mind.
Penn Station was a madhouse. His aunt bought us tickets on one of the new machines. Three $75.00 one way tickets on the Acela. “I’ll pay you back,” I blurted as I watched her dip her credit card, but she didn’t respond. Sometimes as an adult I still worry about paying her back. The train was so crowded that men in business suits were sitting in the aisle. Later we’d learn that we were one of the last trains out of Penn Station before a bomb scare closed it down.
But here’s what I really remember. When we arrived at 30th Street Station, I went to a payphone to call my father and tell him I was there. He had a cell phone for work, one of the first ones I’d ever seen. I kept the phone number in a small Wonder Woman address book that I carried with me all the time.
My father drove a red pick up truck. I can always picture its interior, a light coating of dust on the dashboard, its particular smell, the way I used to sit on the back of it when it was parked in front of our row home. My father was driving around and around 30th Street Station waiting for me to call. I told him I’d go outside and look for his truck.
When I saw his red pick up truck, I started running. “Dad!” I shouted. I remember that he had his door open before the truck fully stopped. He jumped down and he embraced me there in the middle of traffic. This is the moment most indelible.
The calendar for me has always been a source of solace. It is a measurement of how time passes, how things can change, a way to map out what has happened and what could happen next. I feel like trauma has been turned inside out. In the past, catastrophe would strike and then there would be the fallout, but now I feel like I’m living in an ever escalating catastrophe, always bracing for what’s next.
March 1st, the last time I wrote to you, feels so long ago. I wrote you that letter from a luxurious hotel bed in Philadelphia the morning after my family threw a bridal shower for me and Emily, a generous gift from my mother. Everything was about to change. The wedding postponed, the plans canceled. I don’t have words for the anticipatory grief I feel for New York, for people I love, for people I don’t know, for everything that’s gone or will be gone. Emily and I continue to build a home in one another. Last night we watched the news in bed, holding hands that are chapped from washing. When I can’t sleep I make lists in my head: lists of what I’m grateful for. Lists of everyone I love. Lists of who I’m worried about. Lists of restaurants and cafes that I miss. Lists of places we want to travel to. Lists of regrets. Lists of my students who are out there working in healthcare. Lists of poems. And when my panic rises and I can’t make a list, I just count. The numbers are still numbers. The calendar is still a calendar, even if now it is the calendar that I fear. I will write to you all again on May 1st and the world will be different. I hold on to what is indelible.
love, love and love,
c