2001d.New York New York

by Ryan Adams

And love won't play any games with me
Anymore if you don't want it to
The world won't wait and I watched you shake
But honey, I don't blame you
Hell, I still love you, New York
Hell, I still love you, New York
New York

+++++++++++++

September Eleventh fades, even for those of us who were at some imminent place in our own memories. It was my first day back to the Hospitality Industry - Sept 11, 2001, Hampton Inn, Columbus, Ohio.

But that's not really important. In fact, it's very selfish to think of your life in a time like that - I was here on this day - and OF COURSE, I am connected to those people, because I witnessed it.

But, although I can tell you where I was, I think it's more important to tell you where I wasn't. I wasn't in New York. I wasn't in Washington DC. I wasn't in a plane over our country after 8:58am that day.

I wasn't covered in ashes or coughing up blood. None of my ribs were bruised, broken, or crushed. Not my mom, nor my dad, nor the Uncle and I always went to Mets and Jets games. None of them were huffing 150 pounds of fire hose up the North Tower stairwell.

No, I wasn't the guy who WENT UP to rescue others from the 89th floor, when wreckage and devastation had already decimated the 88th floor. I wasn't there when a fireball engulfed fire-treated fabrics of cubicle walls and office furniture.

I wasn't the one using my cellphone, calling a fiancee who was M.I.A. - a civilian stranded in a civil building on an ordinary, unremarkable blue-sky day. I didn't spend the next two weeks stapling and taping and gluing photocopied wanted posters of my father/mother/brother/sister/lover on telephone poles, light posts, or subway walls. My fingers weren't covered in mucilage from all this hopeless work.

I wasn't the one standing in the 2 square blocks of zip code 10048, tiny by zip code standards, watching a snow-fall of office papers, carried about by battling thermal currents. I wasn't the one hearing constant firecrackers.

These weren't firecrackers or explosions: these were 150 pound bodies colliding with concrete after a 1200 foot free-fall.

I wasn't sitting in a hospital waiting room, putting on the bravest face after hearing news about third degree burns, inhaled toxic chemicals and carbon residues - everyday ordinary chemicals, clogging the air and infesting my organs for the next one-hundred years.

I can bore you with my stories of where I was on September 11th.

But all I can remember really is where I wasn't.