I was planning my business trip with my boss the other day. We were plotting the best schedule for my absence from the office.
‘Well, I want you to attend the training on Tuesday, Sept 10,’ he said, poised over my Franklin planner, looking at the calendar as I scribbled in the appointments. ‘So you could travel on Thursday, Sept 12th, or Wednesday, Septem– on Wednesday.’ He said with just a slight hint of pause. I don’t know that he noticed but then I realized that I too have been avoiding saying that date as well.
Wednesday. September 11th.
During one of my psychology classes in college, we learned a little psychoanalysis game. It was basic word association but the real test wasn’t really the word that the subject chose (rarely does the analyst give a word like ‘mother’ and get the response ‘kill’ or something similar) but the non-verbal reactions to the words. Invariably, a word like ‘crypt’ will cause a slight stammer or pause in the respondent, as their unconscious throws up a little hurdle for them to leap. It’s uncomfortable, those words. They have mental weight, like stones dropped into a deep well.
I’m not sure what I expect on Wednesday. I’m not sure if I expect something else to happen. I don’t think that’s what it is.
What will likely happen: loads of diaries will post entries similar to this one, full of memories or pictures of loved ones now a year gone. There will lovely church memorials. At work, we’re having some kind of minute of silence at 9:29 and they’re handing out free flag lapel pins (oh, no freaking comment on that). 
The television will haul out the old footage of the towers burning, the towers collapsing like some Hollywood special effect. I don’t want to see it all again. I don’t want to get numb to it. I think I keep thinking that the buildings must be empty, foam and paint props built for the sole reason of collapsing for the camera so that Keanu Reeves can run and do a dramatic leap to safety in the foreground of the scene. I have to keep reminding myself that there were people in there, that there were vending machines and cubicles and desks with loose change in the drawers and pictures of people’s children and their last vacation to the Caribbean. There were papers and folders and goofy pens and bulletin boards advertising charity raffles and drinking fountains and fathers and sisters and sons and the guy who tried to grope someone at the last Christmas party and the lady who always started talking to you in the elevator but you didn’t like to talk to her because she had bad coffee breath and there was also that girl who always smiled at you when you saw her in the hall and even though you didn’t actually know her name, you knew that she’d be someone you could be friends with. She was in that collapsing building too, trying not to breathe smoke, trying to get out somehow. Somehow.
I keep thinking about my drive to work that morning a year ago. I remember that the sun was shining and it was an incredible day. 
I was in a great mood, especially for a Tuesday. I remember singing along to the radio, although I don’t remember the song, and thinking to myself ‘I have a pretty good life. I’m very happy with it. I love living my life.’ The world seemed such a simple wonderful place and everything snapped together with a click.
And then getting to work and talking to people in the New York office, roughly three blocks away from 5 WTC Plaza and with a splendid view of the harbor, describe how someone in the office watched as a plane flew into the tower. And I remember thinking that it was one of those five seater prop planes, maybe some lunatic with a crop duster like on Independence Day only it wasn’t. It wasn’t.
A few people over the year have sent me emails commending me on my handling of the tragedy on this page. That’s boggling. I hadn’t given it much thought, how I handled it, how I reported it to the world. I don’t think I handled it well at all. I think I wrote a poem a half hour after, which seems so writerly and artsy that I’m embarrassed that I did it, but that’s just how I am. I wanted to get in the car and drive to New York, but I couldn’t, so I wrote a damn poem. Yeah. Nice. Even now as I write this entry, pouring words into a hole in an electronic piece of paper, it’s not enough. It never will be enough.
Grief is a strange thing. I’ll never know if I handle it the best way but I handle it the only way I know how. Esteban handles his grief completely differently, reacting immediately with all of the classic signs. I don’t. People have even commented that when Chelsea died, I had one large entry about it on this page, a thank you for the lovely words of sympathy and then didn’t mention it again. Outwardly, I think it seems like I bottle things up, disassociate from everything, withdraw, but in actuality, I’m trying mentally to get a grasp on things. I take sorrow in levels. I look at the thing as a whole, then tackle the first layer, scraping it away, whittling it down to reveal the next one. But with this’ with this, I haven’t even begun. I keep wandering around the thing, trying to understand its scope, its breadth. I just keep walking around it, trying to circumnavigate the horror, the unbelievable emptiness that was created. And every now and then, I’ll grab a handhold of something and chip away at it, perhaps thinking about how a male and female held hands as they jumped from Tower 1, holding hands as they fell down, or how people went to work that day wearing the clothes that they were buried in but the whole is so large I may never completely understand exactly what to think. I don’t think I’ve even come to the other side yet. I just keep walking.
I did not personally lose anyone in the attacks. In some ways, I barely tolerate my grief. 
What right do I have to claim to be sad when all over the country there are empty places in people’s lives, holes where people used to be? Nature abhors a vacuum and I seem to remember from some high school science class that a vacuum will cause a little pop to occur as air rushes to fill the empty space. I keep imagining thousands of little pops echoing throughout the country, not just on September 11, 2001 but every day, every day of every life. When someone dies, it’s not as though you lose them all at once but through a series of little events’ their pillows lose their smell, their names fall off the incoming mail, you forget what their voices sound like but for in lovely wonderful dreams where you forget that they’ve died and you awaken expecting to find them still breathing, still walking around, still laughing beside you. The only thing that I lost was that I no longer feel as though I understand my place in the world. I never think to myself ‘I love my life’ anymore because I’m too frightened of my own hubris.
Maybe someday, we’ll have September 11th back as just any other day, a day that falls into normalcy and quizzical looks on faces at cash registers while writing a check ‘What day is it?’ and someone will be able to respond without a lump in their throat. But probably not.
Until then, we just keep walking around it, struggling with it the best we can, hoping to come out on the other side intact.
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