I keep watching, listening, hearing, reading all this 9/11 memorial stuff. I can't beleive it's five years. And I can't believe I keep watching; feels like a slight car crash mentality. It's terribly, horribly disturbing, even with all this time passed. I'm drawn to it, and yet I don't want to take it in. Except I end up doing it. It's like a binge: you do it, you think you'll feel OK, then you feel lousy afterwards.
Someone said to me - rather controversially, I believe - that for our generation, 9/11 is "our holocaust". It's true we all remember it, remember where we were, what we were doing. Like, I was IMing with a friend who lived in NY at that time, and then totally lost touch with her, and then bizarrely ran into her at a party this weekend (we are having coffee). Is that synchronicity? Coincidence? Just one of those things (joott)?
I guess it does feel life-defining, that moment. Even though worse (natural) things have and do happen. It was somehow the ordinariness of the day, and the people-like-us feeling (two former colleagues were running an event in Windows on the World and, sadly, died). I remember that evening, J and I were supposed to be going to an art opening, a friend who paints skyscrapers, and I got all dressed up, ready to go, thinking, life goes on. And then walking up the High Road, to the tube, I just realised I couldn't go out and drink and be celebratory. I felt like something tragic had happened to my world, and I needed to be at home. Like, on 7/7 S and I ended up at M's house, because people just wanted to be together. Home, friends, family, those are the things you cling to, I guess, when the world seems scary, complicated, fractured.
I'm not depressed, honest. Just thoughtful.
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