The city is subdued again -- nobody on the subway is saying anything. The only sounds on the way to and from work are the bing-bong of the doors closing, and the announcement of the next stop. The only other time I've heard things this silent here was just under a year ago. Everybody is thinking about it, and thinking about whether or not we're going in to work, or about how far away from televisions we're going to stay.
Random things are making me all teary-eyed. Thinking about this tiny stone museum-house in a park by my apartment did it -- that's where we went walking last year to take a break from looped TV coverage. My alarm clock did it this morning -- Tom Brokaw's voice on it last year started the whole process for me. A fire truck a block from work, doing something as normal as putting out a normal fire, did it, because for one second you don't know if it's a fire or a FIRE.
I've gone through most of the past year being okay. This past week, though -- it's been decidedly not okay. As we get closer and closer to the 11th, my mood is devolving closer and closer to how I felt a year ago. I remember the wine glass that I knocked off the kitchen table and how I was only saved from sobbing on the floor by the intervention of a phone call from Canada. I remember the I Heart New York t-shirt, with "broken" scrawled in black marker over the heart. I remember sitting in Union Square surrounded by rolls of butcher paper and scores of candles, everyone staring south at nothing. I remember standing on my roof, watching bits of paper and ash and airplane and person, floating across the river and landing on the street right in front of my apartment. I remember hearing no voices, hearing no car horns, and looking at chalky, shell-shocked faces. I remember going to the empty bar uptown where ArtStudent worked just for a change of scenery. I remember redialing a hundred times until the call went through, to tell my mom I was okay. I remember the walls of snapshots and Polaroids everywhere I went. And as Shiv points out, I'll always, always remember that smell.
And I remember it all like it was yesterday.