Wounds That Don't Heal
May. 4th, 2002 11:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lawnrrdI got a decent night's sleep last night. I've had few of those over the past two months, so that's a good thing. But I was also so tired that I slept for about 11 hours, and that's going to screw up my schedule for the rest of the day, I expect.
It's not a perfect world.
* * *
Which brings us to last night. My wife, some friends, and I went to a going-away party in Tribeca. We took a cab there, but about 5 blocks away, the traffic on Broadway got so bad that we decided to get out and walk the rest of the way, which also let the cab driver turn and escape the mess.
It was the closest I'd been to the World Trade Center since September 11, and the area had changed so much. I was struck by the number of empty storefronts. The dust was gone or cleaned up, but the reason for the traffic jam was that they City is rebuilding lower Broadway, so only one lane was open.
As we walked, I kept looking to the southwest, where the towers used to be. I don't know what I expected to see there, but I had to look anyway. Then we crossed a street, and I looked down that street, and in a space between two buildings, I saw . . . space, where space had no right to be.
There should have been buildings there--two immense, monumental, brutal, beautiful towers and the lesser buildings that surrounded them. There should have been isolated squares of fluorescent light rising into the darkness, making those towers seem alive in the night. And instead, because of barely-human savages, insulted by anyone who dares to think he has a right to decide what his life will be, there is a shrinking pile of mangled steel, a grave for nearly three thousand people, and . . . space.
I loved those towers. They were immense, cold, stark, inhuman, and out of proportion with every other building around them. That's why they were the most beautiful buildings in New York City.
And being so near and not seeing them did to me the same thing that seeing pictures of the towers does to me, only ten times worse. For an instant, I'm back on the corner of 17th and Broadway on the morning of September 11, filled with shock, grief, rage, and horror, watching as a tower falls, watching as hundreds of people inside die. Watching as something I love ceases to exist.
It's not a perfect world.
Which brings us to last night. My wife, some friends, and I went to a going-away party in Tribeca. We took a cab there, but about 5 blocks away, the traffic on Broadway got so bad that we decided to get out and walk the rest of the way, which also let the cab driver turn and escape the mess.
It was the closest I'd been to the World Trade Center since September 11, and the area had changed so much. I was struck by the number of empty storefronts. The dust was gone or cleaned up, but the reason for the traffic jam was that they City is rebuilding lower Broadway, so only one lane was open.
As we walked, I kept looking to the southwest, where the towers used to be. I don't know what I expected to see there, but I had to look anyway. Then we crossed a street, and I looked down that street, and in a space between two buildings, I saw . . . space, where space had no right to be.
There should have been buildings there--two immense, monumental, brutal, beautiful towers and the lesser buildings that surrounded them. There should have been isolated squares of fluorescent light rising into the darkness, making those towers seem alive in the night. And instead, because of barely-human savages, insulted by anyone who dares to think he has a right to decide what his life will be, there is a shrinking pile of mangled steel, a grave for nearly three thousand people, and . . . space.
I loved those towers. They were immense, cold, stark, inhuman, and out of proportion with every other building around them. That's why they were the most beautiful buildings in New York City.
And being so near and not seeing them did to me the same thing that seeing pictures of the towers does to me, only ten times worse. For an instant, I'm back on the corner of 17th and Broadway on the morning of September 11, filled with shock, grief, rage, and horror, watching as a tower falls, watching as hundreds of people inside die. Watching as something I love ceases to exist.
