Love Is the Higher Law

I asked Claire to come to the concert with me because we’ve become much closer over the past month. Strangely, it was Jasper717 who pointed her in my direction. I mean, Claire and I were already friends. But one day, out of the blue, she came right up to me at my locker and said, “Let’s talk about what’s going on.” And at first I didn’t understand what she meant, but then she was telling me how she was having trouble sleeping, and she asked me where I’d been on the morning of 9/11, because she remembered I wasn’t there. Suddenly we went from being casual friends to being part of each other’s lives—I don’t know how else to explain it. Within a week, we’d made each other NYC Survival mixes—mine with “Walk On” and “Life Is Beautiful” and the Magnetic Fields’ “The Book of Love,” which isn’t about survival at all, but is about why we would want to survive. And she had “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” and Dave Matthews performing “Everyday” acoustically and this song by a singer-songwriter named Cindy Bullens. I’d never heard it before, and I assumed it had been written about 9/11. But later Claire told me, no, it was actually from an album she wrote after her daughter died, and while it’s one of the most startling, grieving albums I’ve ever heard, it also gives a kind of road map for survival. The song—“Better Than I’ve Ever Been”—begins:

There’s been a lot of things said about me

Since that awful day

I’m not the person that I used to be

And that I’ll never be the same

That’s true—no doubt

But I know more now what life is about

I laugh louder

Cry harder

Take less time to make up my mind

and I

Think smarter

Go slower

I know what I want

And what I don’t

I’ll be better than I’ve ever been

It’s become a kind of shorthand for me and Claire. “Laugh louder,” I’ll tell her. “Think smarter,” she’ll tell me. And “love deeper”—a lyric from later in the song.

I know U2 decided to call their tour the Elevation Tour long before current events became current, but it’s still amazing how well it articulates what we’re hoping for as the lights go down and Bono takes the stage. From the very first song, we feel it—all twenty thousand of us feel it. As U2 tears through the anthems—there’s something in that word, anthem—we rise up to meet the music. We’re not just a crowd. We’re not just a gathering. We’re a congregation.

Then the band gets to “One.” As Bono sings, the names of all of the 9/11 victims are projected onto the backdrop of the stage. All of those names. And the song transforms into something much bigger than it is. And we transform into something much bigger than we are. We are crying and holding on to each other and singing along and reading, reading, reading.

All of the names, as we’re told love is the temple, love is the higher law. Who can look at this list of names and not imagine himself or herself on it? Who can’t try to picture what that must be like for friends or family? Some of the names are familiar—not because I know the person, but because I know someone else with that name. And some of the names are familiar because every day I read the page in the New York Times that they devote to telling a brief life story of every single person who died in the attacks. A life is in the details, not the statistics, and every day I learn how one person who died met his wife, or how another who died chose the name for her son. It’s more than a list, because the details add the music. And now I feel I am actually remembering instead of simply memorializing. As accurate or inaccurate as that might be.

If you start the day reading the obituaries, you live your day a little differently. I have been thinking about the people in my life, and how much more I want them to be in my life. Like Aiden, my first boyfriend. I find myself struck with such fondness for our first fumblings, for the sureness that sometimes spills over into arrogance. I’ve talked with him more in the past few weeks than I had in months. Because he’s a part of my history, and part of my present.

And then there’s Claire, standing beside me. As “One” crescendos and we all leave our feelings bare, she and I are both crying. And while usually I’m embarrassed to cry in public, there’s no room for embarrassment here. I look at Claire and think, I want to know you for a long, long time. I want us to be able to share the details we find in obituaries, and the songs that cover the wide terrain of our moods, and the words that come easily, and the words that don’t. Because that’s what friendship is to me right now. What I share with this arena of strangers is one thing, and what I share with Claire is another. Both are essential. Both are part of that higher law.

We are face to face with enormity again, but this time we are going to make it through. It is a moment we can get out of. Together.

DECEMBER 4, 2001

Jasper

I went the whole day without thinking about it. Exams. Exes. Roommate issues—that’s what filled my day. I didn’t let the world in at all. Or that day.

Until, of course, the end of the day, when I realized I had gone the whole day without thinking about it, and wondered what that meant.

THE LIGHTS

Claire

The swim of things. Leaves falling on sidewalks like autumn garlands. Candy corns and the way the light turns crisp as winter approaches. Playground voices. Conversations about favorite movies, favorite books. Friends. New Year’s. A snowman on the sidewalk. Reading a story to your little brother before he goes to sleep.

Holding dear. Realizing the difference between things and possessions is that possessions are the things that are dear to you. Realizing, with this word dear, that things are dear to me. Discovering how dear life is. Same word—slightly different meaning. That twist of fragility.

The weight does not lift itself, although over time it lightens. Sometimes we need to push. And sometimes that is very hard.

It is still strange to see the skyline. I have never seen an absence that’s so physical. It’s possible I will see the absence for the rest of my life, even when there is something else there. Which is okay. The thing to remember when looking at an absence is that you are standing outside of it.

We still feel some things in common. And we still feel some things that are entirely our own. I can only say what I’m feeling, and even that is only the fraction that I can articulate at any given moment. I still have those childish moments when I wish with all my heart that I could wake up and find it’s all been a dream. I really have thought that. I have felt—stronger than grief, stronger than anger, stronger than despair—the profound desire to return to the netherworld of the safer past. There are still the flashes of unexpected sadness, the pauses that last longer than they used to. The desire for retribution, the fear of retribution. Like a death in the family, like a personal tragedy, an event like this lays bare the complexity of our worlds, internal and external.

But you can’t live life in the shadow of all that. I think about the posters, how they went in a matter of days from posters of the missing to posters of the missed. Eventually they were taken down. Gone is not forgotten, but our lives cannot be a memorial. This city cannot be a memorial. This city has to be a city. Our lives have to be our lives.

The swim of things. I go on an airplane. I walk under the Empire State Building. I take the bus, and the subway, and am surrounded by strangers the whole time. I certainly have room in my life for caution, but I have no room in my life for paralyzing fear. There’s always a risk. There always has been. But I’d rather live my life than die of negations.

There is not one moment when that feeling of inadequate sorrow goes away. It just lessens and lessens, until it is mostly a memory of itself.

We live in the same apartment. I go to the same school. I apply to college. I get into college.

Somehow, six months pass.

I’m not at home when they light the lights.

I’m at school, finishing up our environmental club newsletter. I’m the last one there besides the janitors, and it’s dark out when I finally leave. It’s March 11 and I have been aware of the anniversary all day, but I still gasp when I look downtown and see the beam of blue light coming from where the towers used to be. I feel such a silence pass through me. Ghosts.

I know what I have to do. And suddenly it’s the opposite of that day. Because instead of walking away, I am walking toward. Instead of taking my brother’s hand and heading north of Fourteenth Street, I am alone and heading home. The towers have been resurrected as spirits, and I am going to visit them. In the chilly night-darkness, they are their own beacon. All I have to do is go down the street and face the right way. There they are. Alighting over the tops of the SoHo buildings. Hiding behind streetlamp glare, arching over our heads. I keep walking. I keep following. Past Canal Street. Past Duane.

I still find it hard to see Ground Zero. I still find it hard to witness the nothingness. The lights are not a remedy for this. There will never be a remedy for this. But they are a strikingly apt presence. They are both something and nothing at once. They fill the space without claiming it as their own. They are translucent. They blur.

I walk down the nearly empty West Side Highway. I walk past Stuyvesant, toward the pedestrian bridge we all saw on TV that day. I think of turning back. I’m not sure I can do it. I have been so good about getting back to normal, about moving on, about forgetting enough so the pain doesn’t keep me awake, but remembering enough so that I am a different, better person. The lights keep drawing me on. Because I know that in a short time they will be gone. And I know I have to experience them before they disappear.

I reach the base. It’s not at Ground Zero—it’s a few blocks over, surrounded by offices that were untouched that day. You can see the buildings right through the lights. Each beam is made of dozens of singular rays that seem, at the bottom, entirely like the latticework of the towers. There are not many people at the base—mostly families, the children running around as if they’re at a playground, a light show. I don’t mind their laughter or their chatter; it’s a nice juxtaposition against the size of the moment, like having a baby make noise at a funeral. I face skyward, tracing the intersection of seeming parallels. Light like specters and souls and geometry. Towers of lights of towers.

I walk to the edge of the lights and see Ground Zero, see Century 21. I could just go home. I could call it a night.

But something about the lights has emboldened me. I head west. Frightened.

This is something I haven’t told anyone. Not Peter. Not my mom. Not Jasper. Even though I pass by Ground Zero almost every day, I still have been too afraid to go to Rockefeller Park. It’s a small stretch of park along the Hudson, and it’s always been one of my favorite places in New York, one of those magical corners that you feel is your own even though you share it with thousands of people. I knew it wasn’t part of Ground Zero—I knew it was probably okay—but still I hadn’t tried to see it. I hadn’t wanted to see it any different, was afraid I would find it cordoned off or shifted over to rubble. When buildings collapse, why respect a park?

But tonight it’s time. I walk around Stuyvesant. I turn the corner. I hold my breath. I look. And it’s still there. Every railing. Every step. Everything.

When I hit the water’s edge, I turn south, toward the plaza. Because seeing the park … seeing the Jersey ferry dock … suddenly I know what I have to find. My favorite piece, the railing directly outside the World Financial Center, the one inscribed with a quote from Walt Whitman and a quote from Frank O’Hara—quotes I have not been able to remember. I’ve only been able to remember how much I loved them. I have always loved them, always made a point to walk by them, always assumed they’d always be there. And since 9/11, I’d assumed they’d been destroyed in everything that had happened.