Cope

Setember 13

Good evening, all.

Let's see. Yesterday I went to work, and in the evening watched television with Heather, and we held each other, and I read Passage by Connie Willis which is all about disasters and near-death-experiences and mortality, and it seems more apropos than morbid, honestly. Like these are reasonable things to think about, now.

Today I read about a playwright who approached his script with new gusto after the attacks, because he felt a desperate need to create something in the face of all that destruction.

It's a better reaction than many, I guess.

I talked to Meg on the phone tonight. It was good to hear her voice. I knew she was okay, but I didn't know it until I talked to her. She says it's odd, being in New York now... she's only been there a few weeks, she doesn't know many people (just a few other students, non-New-Yorkers, mostly), she doesn't have a routine that's been disrupted... yet she's surrounded by the devastation, the walking wounded. She's a social worker, and her first impulse is to dive in and do something, to help, but the hospitals are turning away volunteers, so she's somewhat at loose ends, trying to go to classes and get started on her placement in the midst of the madness... It was good to talk to her. I'm glad I did.

I've been hiding, I guess. Working. I sent out poetry contracts last night, sent poems to Timprov, kept busy. I don't want to think about this. And when I do, I shy away from the emotional enormity of it, and think about historical stuff-- you know, we recovered from bloody civil war, San Francisco rebuilt after the earthquake, Dresden is (I hear) a lovely city now despite being completely razed by firebombs in WWII... I keep thinking, People get through it. We rebuild. But it's cold comfort. I also keep thinking, I want it to be five years from now. I want this to be behind us. But we have to live through it. I've gotten off so easy, I'm relatively untouched by this, I didn't lose anyone... I just have generalized fear, of more attacks, of racial intolerance and hate crimes directed at people of Middle Eastern descent (hell, of anyone brown, really) (you know, you'd think we'd have outgrown the mentality of times when Jews were hanged during the Black Plague, when Japanese-Americans were put in internment camps after Pearl Harbor, but I guess we haven't, really). I worry about our government striking out prematurely and foolishly. They so desperately want this to be a state-sponsored attack, they really want to have someone we can hit. The anthill that is America has been kicked over, and (understandably), we're looking for someone to bite. I worry about martial law, about draconian measures taken in the name of "public safety"...

But I'm just going on. Writing, working, reading, loving Heather, thinking about poetry, making tea. Keeping hold of those touchstones of normalcy, hoping that normalcy isn't snatched away from me, the way it was snatched away from thousands of people in New York and hundreds in Washington, D.C.... Hoping we can come through this to a place that makes sense. Knowing that, eventually, we will. Knowing that we have to live through the whole ugly mess first, though. Those of us who are fortunate to still be living at all.