Now they say the work at ground zero will end and there will be a ceremony and all those men will try to go on with their lives and so will we, and I'm sitting here wondering why I don't feel happy that the work is ending.
Maybe some part of me feels that as long as there are people there working and searching for bodies and answers, there is some kind of hope.
Hope for what, I don't know.
It's been a rough week for me, to tell you the truth.
First there were the terror alerts, rekindling all my paranoias. I climbed the stairs to the roof the morning after the alerts hit the airwaves to have my coffee in the sun. It was a beautiful crisp morning.
It was hard not to feel an eerie deja vu sipping my coffee as countless helicopters whirled by. Most of them whirled about downtown.
The Brooklyn Bridge was just off to the downtown east of me.
The World Trade Center had been just off to the downtown west.
I don't think the helicopters would have bothered me much if it weren't such a pretty morning.
Pretty, crisp, sunny mornings tend to make me nervous now.
What I mostly felt, as I watched far too many helicopters whirl by, was lonely.
My dirty little secret of September 11th was how alone it all made me feel. No one in my life seemed to truly understand what I was feeling, what I had seen, where I had been, but then I couldn't understand where they were coming from, either. All of our processes were and are so different.
My lover and I dealt with 9/11 in ways, as opposite to each other as could be. I needed to throw myself into it head on and had no interest in anything else for some time. For her, 9/11 hit too close to home, home being war-torn. She opted to stay as far away from the towers and the turbulence as possible, which meant uptown or out of town. Needless to say, September was a rough time for us, neither one being able to really understand the other. I have no idea what its like to grow up in a war-torn country. She has no idea what it felt like to watch the towers fall or to be down there in those first days. I guess we're even.
I know it's unfair to expect any one else's process of this horrific event to be similar to my own. Even the great people I met down there who were in the trenches with me, were dealing with things in their very own and very different way.
Carol has still not accepted that it happened. She said she crawled inside herself and has not come out yet. If that's true, I'd love to meet the full her one day; the submerged Carol has been so sweet.
Dom says he got hooked on the adrenaline and now wants to join the Marines. Dom is over 50, but I think he can do anything he sets his mind to.
As I said, it's been a strange week.
The terror alerts rekindled those moments of real fear after the towers were hit. I felt frightened at the oddest times. For example, I was waiting for the subway, and I could see it stopped on the tracks not moving. I started to wonder if the blast would carry the 200 feet or so to me, if it were to blow. I realized I was backing up.
Then my personal life just, well, blew up this week.
My ex-wife was in town. We shared 5 years together, and while we didn't work out as lovers, she probably was the closest thing I had to family. I think of her now as some morph between my sister, daughter and mother. You can see why we needed to be platonic. Her parents (my former in-laws) wanted to have dinner, just the four of us.
I hadn't seen them since she and I were together. We've been broken up now for over three years.
It went well actually. They were very sweet, and the conversation flowed during dinner. We even went for a walk through my neighborhood after. In the times I'd met them before I think they were more concerned about their daughter's sexuality and me being caught up in that. I don't think they ever really saw me before. I don't think I ever really saw them, either.
I like them.
My sister was in town (yes same week), visiting yet another doctor to help her with a disease that her doctor has said is part real, part imagined. He gave her drugs, as all her doctors do. It took her less than 24 hours to complain that the drugs weren't to her liking. I think they're running out of things to give her. I guess I am, too.
So, as if this past week could get any longer, or more complex, my lover and I mutually decided to separate, or "take a break," as we put it. I don't know whether it will be for a week, a month, a summer or forever. I honestly have no clue, and I have no clue how to work out the problems between us either, if they can be worked out.
Certainly there's no shortage of love between us; there never was. I could fill this site with myriad theories, but that would be far too personal to share with you and far too unfair to her, so I'll just say ... things seem to really suck right now.
Also, according to all the theatre folks who were in Reaction, I've got the post-show blues. They all warned me about this, that if you dedicate six months of your life to a project and then the project finally happens and then ends, no matter how successful it was, you may wind up feeling like total crap afterwards.
Evidently the only cure is another huge project and, oh, traveling helps. Dror, my partner, is taking the month of July to travel from China to Russia and beyond on the Mongolian Express. That guy has balls. Well, he's a guy, he's supposed to have them.
I guess I feel the travel bug, too, but all my pull points to the same place its been pointing to for a year now, Israel. I'm resolved to go there soon. Fuck the suicide bombers. I need to go to Israel despite them. Or maybe because of them. I have no idea.
Anyway, my brain is fried, and this rant has delved a little deeper into my personal life than I generally go, but hey, life is short. I might as well say what I have to now; sometimes tomorrow never comes.
