Seven is a mythical number in the world, and seven years is an almost mythical amount of time. In the Bible, Joseph forsaw seven years of bumper crops followed by seven years of famine for Egypt. There’s seven years bad luck if you break a mirror. You supposedly get a seven year itch after enough time with one person (hmmm…I’ll think about that next year).
Seven years ago today, I did a lot of growing up in a hurry. When I woke up, I was almost 24 and relatively carefree. My coursework for my MFA was over, I was about to give up my part-time job at Some College to be a temp in the city so I could focus on dramaturgy, and all I was thinking about on my commute in to work on September 11, 2001 was how blue the sky was and how good the music on my CD player sounded. The next hours changed my life forever. I tried desperately to find out where my friends were, since such a large number of them were in and around the WTC that day. Eventually I learned that they were all safe, a miracle that even today blows my mind. That we all made it through, with only varying amounts of mental scarring depending upon where we were and what we saw/heard/felt…we were very lucky although at times over the years it hasn’t always felt like that. I was emotionally numb for days, weeks, months. The temp jobs in the city dried up, and I took my current full-time job at Some College to pay the bills. I think my artistic career has been one of the casualties of 9/11 as surely as anything else: although I do get to work as a dramaturg in fits and starts, having a 9-5 job means that I don’t get to work on shows that rehearse during those hours. 9/11 did not kill my artistic life, but it stunted it and redirected it greatly, and it’s taking a lot of work, thought, and planning to get it back to where I feel it should be (not there yet).
September 11, 2001 also put my friends and I on the path to what I call our “wild year,” the year where five of us were out drinking almost every night of the week, curled up in one dive bar or another, and sleeping on each others’ couches before running off to work the next morning. There was so much hurt to get through, so many things that we wanted to say but discovered we weren’t ready to talk about, but kept trying to get out anyway…and we were no different from anyone else. Young New York had its very own Lost Generation that year, and as we looked at the tables around us we saw faces so similar to our own trying to find an escape or at the very least some peace through laughter, alcohol, and nicotine. Eleven months after 9/11, I started dating Rick and started to emerge from that hard shell I had put up to protect myself from the hurt. Seven years after 9/11, I think I’m down to the last few layers. And what have I turned into because of this? I still have no idea.
So today, for those of you in the rest of the country and the rest of the planet: know that the living victims of 9/11, which I believe includes everyone who had their hometown or place of work hit by a plane on that beautiful day seven years ago, even those who didn’t lose anyone in the blasts…just know that we’re making it through the other side. And thank you for all of your thoughts for us over the years.
