Writer's Block: 9/11
Sep. 11th, 2008 10:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
uberreiniger[Error: unknown template qotd]
I do a post about this every year. I came home from work and went to sleep. Two hours later my co-worker called and woke me up, told me what was going on. I turned on TV and watched for a while. I called my two closest friends, one of whom I was in love with at the time. I wanted to hear her voice and know that she was okay even though we were all in the middle of the Midwest, far from any of the danger. I wanted to make sure that our trip to the Rennaisance Festival we'd planned for that weekend was still on, because it didn't seem like anything that had been in place on the day before could possibly still exist. By then I needed to go for a walk so I went down to the local game store and talked with the owner for a while. After that I had no choice but to go home and get a few hours shut-eye since I had to be back at six p.m. to work a twelve-hour. I remember driving to work, seeing the lines of cars at all the gas stations where prices had been jacked up in panic. I got supper at Arbys and can still remember exactly what I ordered. I spent the night at work IM'ing with my friend Beth while we watched the coverage together in our seperate locations.
This decade has been unlike any other in my life and I think it's all because of 9/11. In the 90's I was in high school and college with all the huge experiences and changes that every day of those brings. Every year felt like its own decade. In 1996 1992 felt very far away. In 2008 2001 feels very recent to me and I have to stop to remind myself that it has been seven years. I still feel like I just moved to this city and have to remember that I've been here the greater part of a decade. I have now lived here longer than I lived in my last town, and yet the time there felt so much longer.
It's because the world changed. It's because 9/11 2001 is always there breathing over my shoulder; the disaster and horror and death were weird signposts of a huge transition in my own life. It was like a Tarot reading in which I flipped the Tower. Except it was a real tower burning with real people falling out of it and dying.
I think about 9/11 every single day. I don't obsessess over it, but the images pass through my mind, the name "9/11" gets breathed through my thoughts as a whisper.
So much has changed. We are nearing the end of a decade. And yet it still feels like I just got here, that I'm in a new place with new people waiting to see what the next day in this transformed world is going to bring.
I do a post about this every year. I came home from work and went to sleep. Two hours later my co-worker called and woke me up, told me what was going on. I turned on TV and watched for a while. I called my two closest friends, one of whom I was in love with at the time. I wanted to hear her voice and know that she was okay even though we were all in the middle of the Midwest, far from any of the danger. I wanted to make sure that our trip to the Rennaisance Festival we'd planned for that weekend was still on, because it didn't seem like anything that had been in place on the day before could possibly still exist. By then I needed to go for a walk so I went down to the local game store and talked with the owner for a while. After that I had no choice but to go home and get a few hours shut-eye since I had to be back at six p.m. to work a twelve-hour. I remember driving to work, seeing the lines of cars at all the gas stations where prices had been jacked up in panic. I got supper at Arbys and can still remember exactly what I ordered. I spent the night at work IM'ing with my friend Beth while we watched the coverage together in our seperate locations.
This decade has been unlike any other in my life and I think it's all because of 9/11. In the 90's I was in high school and college with all the huge experiences and changes that every day of those brings. Every year felt like its own decade. In 1996 1992 felt very far away. In 2008 2001 feels very recent to me and I have to stop to remind myself that it has been seven years. I still feel like I just moved to this city and have to remember that I've been here the greater part of a decade. I have now lived here longer than I lived in my last town, and yet the time there felt so much longer.
It's because the world changed. It's because 9/11 2001 is always there breathing over my shoulder; the disaster and horror and death were weird signposts of a huge transition in my own life. It was like a Tarot reading in which I flipped the Tower. Except it was a real tower burning with real people falling out of it and dying.
I think about 9/11 every single day. I don't obsessess over it, but the images pass through my mind, the name "9/11" gets breathed through my thoughts as a whisper.
So much has changed. We are nearing the end of a decade. And yet it still feels like I just got here, that I'm in a new place with new people waiting to see what the next day in this transformed world is going to bring.
