dear thomas,

i’m listening to tyrannosaurus rex’s unicorn album. reflecting. steeping ginger tea after a beautiful day. it started with a letter to my granddad, then tea with my friend melissa and a bike ride to the beach with melissa and toby. now home, i’ve finished a gorgeous salad, garnished with figs and plums from my backyard, and made banana-coconut milk ice cream, served with a spoonful of the fig and rosemary jam made yesterday by my roommate from our harvest, while listening to npr’s coverage of the 10th anniversary commemoration proceedings in new york and around the world.

you are very much in my thoughts tonight, thomas. ton ton. i’d told jason about a month ago that i intended to write about that day ten years ago, ahead of the anniversary, and that i would probably talk to you in preparation. but i hadn’t yet been ready to commit myself to the kind of heavy meditation that would be required to remember and then record what my experience was.

my experience. such a thin, incomplete phrase. it was our experience. yours and mine, as much as that of the people we walked amongst as we stepped outside your building on waverly and into the blinding sunshine, parading almost along the city streets, down a car-less 5th avenue, awash in white clothing and crumpled spirits; of the people we embraced at the alters of candles and flowers in washington square park at night; of the people covered in ash, trudging like zombies up broadway, a continuous train of trauma, northward from the glass and steel grave sites we used to call the world trade centre.

our photo expedition below houston. sitting on your roof in the dark, twisting my face at the shafts of light meant to commemorate what and who we’d lost. the pandemonium back at my dorm - and how i wished to escape it. the vulnerability that would sometimes flash to anger when confronted with the “have you seen my husband” flyers posted outside every subway station in the city. the bewildering, tragic irony of that enormous american flag strung across… was it 3rd street? near a. a symbol of something meaningful to the hells angels who had raised it, but also a symbol i associated with the disease that had infected the people who’d flown those planes into the towers. and then the call of a stupid man - a mere human, crippled by power and dullness, vested with the power of the world’s greatest military - to go shopping and return to daily life. as if nothing had happened.

and part of me turned off.

one month later, appeasing your mother and her fear of another attack, we trekked out to the hamptons. i remember listening to “3rd planet from the sun” in your car the night we arrived - remember the traffic? - numb and acute simultaneously. and then waking up in the hotel the next morning, seeing the light stream in through the sides of the blinds and expecting - really truly - that when i pulled them back i would find a world reduced to dust, a post-apocalyptic scene of smoldering ashes and nuclear winter. but it was yet another beautiful day. i almost had to blink to make sure what i was seeing was real: everything was as it had been. nothing had changed.

but of course everything had changed.

(rereading this, i am struck with how true this was for you even more than for me, your parents’ breakup occurring alongside all of this. i’m so sorry, thomas. i hope i gave you a shoulder worthy of the pain; if i didn’t, i’m sorry for that too.)

and yet i never cried. life accelerated and my body deteriorated as i juggled three jobs, a full course load, a thesis film and a massive kidney infection.

i remember when the tears and the sorrow finally came: the six month anniversary, and the tv special that brought it all flooding back. i balled my eyes out in your bed, unable even to be in the same room as images flashed across the screen of endless planes crashing into endless buildings. the sun glinting off endless shards of glass that seemed to fall and fall forever. sorry for myself and embarrassed that it had taken so long to let the feelings through. i remember how angry it made you, my crying, and i couldn’t understand why. but i do now. it was all too much. the catharsis too intense.

in the years since, my relationship to these memories has at times evolved toward something approaching reverence, other times anguish, other times, i’ll admit, regressing to the point where i’ve caught myself almost revelling in that pitiful feeling of deep, unconsolable sorrow. but even in those moments when the tears well up i question myself - why am i so overcome by the memory of that time? why does it sting so much? i wasn’t in the towers. i didn’t directly know anyone who died. i didn’t cry when it happened. so why now?

but i think the answer isn’t so easy. it was a significant event. everything changed. everyone changed. and yet nothing changed at the same time. and i felt betrayed - so utterly and totally betrayed.

we could have risen higher. we could have changed our ways. we could have righted the wrong we’d committed to elicit such punishment. america kind of broke my heart after that day, and i have more than once reflected on this fact. while sitting primly from the sidelines, north of the country, in a provincial outpost called canada - or across an ocean, isolated from everything i’d ever known, an island drowning in a foreign sea.

but something has changed in me lately. and i’m seeing it somewhat differently now. because the truth is i changed. many people changed. and while that may not have looked how i wanted it to look - fair labour practice, the abolishment of free trade, a more conscientious marketplace, love and peace and lalala - we changed nonetheless.
everything changed.

thank you, thomas, for being a part of that experience with me. thank you for being an oasis of creativity, silliness and sanity in a world gone insane with fear and patriotism. thank you for sharing love and kindness and beauty. and thank you for you. i am so grateful.

tonight, i feel humble at the feet of that deity of destruction; kali is her name. she knocked down our towers of gluttonous ignorance so we could be made to rebuild something stronger, more precise and bearing integrity. in ourselves and for each other.

there is something greater than human accomplishment, greater than human action on any scale. a universe alive and quivering. its whys and why nots moving our hands and beating our hearts toward something we’ll never fully see, nor understand. but if we get real quiet, and if we relieve ourselves of our heavy hubris, we may actually feel it. its power and its grace.

good night.

love, hilary