aeleven

I sing every chance I get.

The boat is the thing you get into when the ship is sinking.

I heard a plane again, for the first time in a while and I didn't shudder

...Some of the things I've written around here of late. Except for the plane thing, I erased that. It's still really difficult to talk about that day and I don't think I'll try, but it's there. It lives buried and suppressed by the daily shitstorm of this city, and although sometimes you think it's forgotten, It's old news. It's over. It's in the past, it is not. That day is there and for anyone that was here, I think it will always live hidden and ready to jump out at you and say, Hey motherfucker! You can never forget me. I am a splinter, hot schrapnel eating at your soul. You were scared. You were confused, and You were ready to run. But we didn't run, the lucky majority of us not immediately under fire. We hunkered down, we held strangers hands, and we lived with that stench like we were both captors and freed. I do no mean to romanticize those terrible days that turned to months, but people here walked differently, and looked differently at each other. This huge metropolis was suddenly and briefly, human. We couldn't understand the people who were scared to visit, the school boards that cancelled field trips caught up in the mass paranoia. It was our city and it was the best place in the world... I hope it never happens again, but again we are zombies.

This is what I was really thinking about, planes... For months after September 11th loud noises were scary. They'd shake you, grab you, make your whole body flinch. Our apartment was suddenly, or were they always there, under siege by the endless assembly line of planes on their flight pattern in to LaGuardia. Lying in bed at night, with our windows saranwrapped shut (they were broken, couldn't be closed, no screens, and the dust and stench was terrible), one of every two planes would sound too low. The last place they'll hit is the East Village. It's all poor people, hispanics, and artists. Still, the planes never stopped and they kept you half awake. For so long, we slept with shoes at the side of the bed. We used to wake and the only thing on the blue sky were those two towers. Now gone, those planes had taken and replaced them and jesuschrist it was unsettling. Anyway, it's been a while, I am one of the zombies, but up on my roof the other day I heard a plane and I didn't jump. The planes have always been there, now they remind me I'm alive.

Really, today is a great day. I just got lost in a moment of thought.