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Originally Posted by videoxpix
Here is a moving 1st person account written by a close friend,
who got so freaked out, he picked up & moved his family from NJ to Fiji.
One View of Many |
Your FRIEND??!!
Wow, that is amazing. I lived in NY all my life until '98 and worked in Tower #2 for 4 years, and I've never even met anyone who was close when it happened. Maybe I should get back there more -- only been back once since it happened.
Anyway, your friend is a great journalist.
It saddens me to realize it's probably the extraordinary mind and spirit trauma he had just suffered that gave his writing that "unaffected" voice -- it never once betrays any subjectivity. But that's probably the reason. Thanks very, very much for sharing this. Ive always felt kinda, I dunno -- bad -- that I was living in California when it happened. When I found out it was like noon in NY. It made me realize that TV's are only the tiniest, most useless little windows when it comes to any reality of value. It's not just the size of the screen that destroys access to the truth of things, it's also the fact that TV operates in its own "time" -- flickers and edits.
So when I went back to NY for the first time after 9/11, in Summer '04, I felt like a person might feel who walked into a room where a really sad story or a funny joke had just been told -- disconnected. Since long before I made the trip back in '04, I always thought in the back of my head that I was going to "measure" myself when I got to NY -- measure the present me against the man I remembered having been THERE. This way I might get a better handle on the effects of California on me. Returning to NY was supposed to give me a more
original origin, that I might better assess the distance traveled. But it was impossible to make the comparison, when I got there. I had lost the thread completely. New York was different. I was different. But the worst part, and it was quite eery for me to discover it while being there, was that we had lost all our
common history. It didn't feel like City and man had simply grown apart. It felt like we had never been together in the first place.
For not being there when it happened, 9/11 severred me irrevocably from the city of my birth, my childhood and my early adulthood. All I had to answer the question "What the FUCK happened here?" was my memories of watching the TV for 24 hours straight in the strangest kind of pain I've ever known.
After the visit to NY in Summer '04 I had a few more "souvenirs" I'd picked up there, to help me build an answer for myself to the question. They included the changes to my older brother's face, and an incredible slice of blue sky visible from a spot on Broadway in Lower Manhattan (across the street from where the Towers still were in my head) where there had never been a slice of blue sky to see before.
Reading Jonathan's memoir has given me another piece for my answer. I really appreciate it.
j-