Quicksand
I've never written anything about 9/11. I've never thought I really had anything to say about it; not like Meg Cabot's absolutely wrenching tale of first hand experiences that day. I experienced it, yes, and I vividly remember every detail of that day, but I never thought what I had to say was significant.
Lately it just feels very relevant to my life. So I'm going to talk about it here.
I was on my way to Bioethics class in my senior year at a Catholic high school. Uniformed, tired, shuffling my way to class in the basement. A girl named Amanda breezed past me in the hall--literally breezed, there wasn't a lot of air flow down there and kind of like on a subway, the act of moving displaced enough air to make it feel like wind--and said "Did you hear? Someone ran into the World Trade Center".
I wrinkled my nose, confused. "With a car?" I was picturing the mostly stone building of the Boston World Trade Center and thinking that wouldn't matter enough for her to pass it on in the hall.
Our bioethics class got relocated to the library to watch the news coverage, and that when we found out everything.
The Twin Towers.
Two planes.
Terrorists.
The Pentagon.
Flights to and from Boston (there were actually no flights to Boston, but two flights departing from Boston were used in the attacks; this wasn't clear at the time).
And then my heart stopped, because it suddenly became more than a bad dream: my dad was on a plane from DC to Boston. Like the one that might have crashed into the Pentagon.
And on a day when bad dreams became reality, it seemed likely that there was no good luck left, and my dad had been on the plane.
I tried to stay calm; I tried not to think about it, and the teachers did a good job of keeping us busy. Really, we did not know how bad it was. It wasn't until after school that I would see footage of the buildings collapsing, of bodies jumping out, of the photo-shopped devil in the cloud of smoke around the towers. I just kept thinking to myself, 9/11. 911. 9/11. 911.
And then I was heading to lunch, and I turned into the long hallway at my school, and I saw my mom, her face devastated, holding her purse, at the end of the hallway.
He's dead.
I couldn't get within ten feet of her; I just stopped, and by that time the hallway had cleared out. "It's dad?" I asked, because sometimes there are things you can't say, and sometimes there are things you have to say.
My mum ran forward and hugged me and said, "No, no, he's fine, his plane is later. I couldn't get through on your cell phone and I just needed to check if you were ok."
My dad's flight was grounded, and he ended up renting a car and driving back from DC--driving past the barrier around the smoking Pentagon--and maybe it's for this reason that I've always felt like somehow, by the grace of God, I got one of those tiny threads of luck on that awful day.
But I remember, so vividly, coming home and sitting on the couch with my mom and my dog and curling my fingers in her fur as we watched the news because it was something solid to hold.
As a person entering adulthood, 9/11's impact in my life wasn't immediate. It wasn't something I felt for a long time, and I feel like it's now that I can look back and better understand. It took the security away. It took the floor out from underneath me in a global way, because it made me wonder if America would cease to be the country I knew; if all of things we read about in other countries and cultures would happen here (like a total destabilization of government and economy); if America wasn't safe anymore.
I wasn't sure of anything. How many were dead; if it would happen again; what it meant to my life.
Things normalized. We, as a country, found a way to continue on, and that felt inspirational. But I understood that things could never be sure again, never be simple.
It had happened to me about six years before that--my parents divorced, and in the most emotional, personal and quiet way, the floor had fallen out from underneath me. Everything I knew that had been protective and anchoring was gone, was called into question. Then, a few years later, 9/11 happened and it felt like the outside world destabilized as well.
There was a natural loss of faith in the world around me, a natural loss of my personal sense of faith in God. As I graduated, that felt like a typical progression; leaving Catholic school behind to go to college, and intellectually shaking my fist at God. But I think it was a lot deeper than that--the only thing I could trust anymore was myself and whatever was going on within my head.
I felt the same way when the economy nosedived as I graduated from college and I couldn't get a job. Like all these things I'd always known--real estate is the best investment because it always appreciates, going to college means you'll make more money and get a better job, college graduates are SUCCESSFUL--weren't true anymore.
Looking back, I feel like a lot of the past 15 years of my life have been spent bracing myself over quicksand, frozen and crying and straddling the pit, trying not to fall in, trying not to get sucked in. And never really succeeding. All I've ever wanted was to make something stable for myself, something I could rely on--someONE I could rely on, too.
But I think that's naive. Because in a lot of ways, I have just been waiting, and it's no one's job but my own to create something stable. While divorce sucked, and 9/11 was arguably the greatest tragedy our nation has known, and the economy crashing was something that ruined the lives of a lot of people, clearly these things happen. Terrorist attacks. Natural disasters. Layoffs. People deciding they don't love you anymore. And one way or another, finding out the person you become is determined by how you weather these storms.
The floor will fall out beneath you up to a hundred times a day. What you don't see coming will wreck your world, and instead of clinging to the wreckage, instead of bracing above the quicksand, I think the only solution is to, when the floor disappears, figure out a way to fly.
