“Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead”

I’ve already written my post about what I experienced on 9/11.  I’ve been thinking about it a lot since the earthquake, when I found myself fleeing that same office building, not knowing what had happened. I remember hearing that a plane had hit the first tower that September morning, a decade ago, and thinking it must be pilot error, a small plane, a small, understandable tragedy. We were all so innocent.  When the earthquake happened I was sure, for a few dizzy and nauseating moments, that something horrible was happening, something out of my control that I might not survive.

What I’ve realized is how close to the surface those fears are since that awful bluesky morning, how they lurk just below the conscious level for many of us who lived through that terrible day in one of the targeted cities, who make our lives in one of those cities still.  Whose heart hasn’t stuttered a bit at a plane flying low?  Who hasn’t edged away from a backpack slumped on a bench, ownerless? My first thought when the earth shook a few weeks ago was fury at myself for not having a “go bag” in my office, for being stuck evacuating in stupid, hampering shoes, for not having made myself strong enough to run the hell away from my city on my own two feet if the worst thing happened.

This Sunday, I’m going to cook good food and read a good book and take my dog for a long walk. I don’t need to watch the memorials to remember what happened and how it made me feel. I don’t need to see the faces of the dead and the bereaved to be moved to close my eyes and send them some light. I don’t need to see replayed images of those towers falling or the Pentagon crumpling to know how profoundly I don’t ever want to see anything like that again.

I Saw You Walking * Deborah Garrison

I saw you walking through Newark Penn Station
in your shoes of white ash. At the corner
of my nervous glance your dazed passage
first forced me away, tracing the crescent
berth you’d give a drunk, a lurcher, nuzzling
all comers with ill will and his stench, but
not this one, not today: one shirt arm’s sheared
clean from the shoulder, the whole bare limb
wet with muscle and shining dimly pink,
the other full-sheathed in cotton, Brooks Bros.
type, the cuff yet buttoned at the wrist, a
parody of careful dress, preparedness—
so you had not rolled up your sleeves yet this
morning when your suit jacket (here are
the pants, dark gray, with subtle stripe, as worn
by men like you on ordinary days)
and briefcase (you’ve none, reverse commuter
come from the pit with nothing to carry
but your life) were torn from you, as your life
was not. Your face itself seemed to be walking,
leading your body north, though the age
of the face, blank and ashen, passing forth
and away from me, was unclear, the sandy
crown of hair powdered white like your feet, but
underneath not yet gray—forty-seven?
forty-eight? the age of someone’s father—
and I trembled for your luck, for your broad,
dusted back, half shirted, walking away;
I should have dropped to my knees to thank God
you were alive, o my God, in whom I don’t believe.