Annie Leibovitz/Philippe Petit.
Ten years ago tomorrow, I was driving my little brother to school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was a sophomore and not quite permit-ready, and I remember being a bit annoyed at having to wake up at the crack of dawn to chauffeur him to class. I was busy packing for my freshman year of of college, and was using my last few days of freedom to obsess about what clothes to take, to determine which sentimental childhood possessions might be mocked in my dorm room, and to sleep heavily into the mid-morning. That Tuesday, my mom had a rare day off from the doctor grind, and had asked me to take on the morning drive so that she could get some things done around the house. Grumbling, I hopped in the car.
On my way home from dropping Noah off at the school I had just graduated from, I remember feeling a pang of both triumph and fear; I would be moving away from home in days, perhaps never to return in any permanent way. It was in the midst of these thoughts that the top 40 radio station I was listening to cut off mid-song to announce the first plane having hit. I sped home. By the time I flicked on the TV and called my mom in to watch the coverage with me, we saw the second plane and didn’t move from the set for another eight hours, pausing only to go back to the school to collect my brother and bring him home. I remember never having been happier in my life to drive someone anywhere, ever. That ride remains unmatched.
The next week, we had to drive 26 hours to my campus because there were no flights. All of the anxiety I had been brewing during the summer about making friends, fitting in, picking classes, the minutiae of whether or not to wear flipflops in the shower — it was all suddenly rendered frivolous. What replaced it was a more generalized feeling of worry about our country and our future, but also an openness and gratitude for the unknown. I had been given the gift of being thrown in with a pile of peers in the days following the attacks, all of us strangers, all of us desperate for connection, all thankful for the overwhelming and distracting process of unpacking. The time we might have spent whispering about loners in the dining hall (though it would come later, in an equally disheartening and comforting return to teen normalcy) was spent talking about where we were, how we felt, how we were affected. The standard ice breakers became venues for catharsis. The ice was broken; we tried not to be.
Four years later, one day after graduation, I moved to New York City with a rabid determination. Ever since I inherited my mother’s tattered Eloise books as a child, New York had become my focus; my intention; my endpoint. Early visits sealed the deal. I got to perform on the stage of Carnegie Hall as a teenager and I almost passed out from the thrill. I meditated on the city in yoga class, it was every wish over birthday candles, it was what I asked a higher power for on the one day I felt the right to speak directly to God at thirteen. It was my mental solution to any problem I encountered as a teenager, so I invoked it hundreds of times. When the towers fell, the ambition became all the more intense. I felt a need to get to the city in its time of pulling together, to be a part of something that I felt I already belonged to by some generational osmosis. My great-grandfather was the president of the Manhattan Chess Association and a prominent lawyer who presided over an intellectual circle on the Upper West Side that included Marcel Duchamp. My grandfather was a Columbia graduate and met my grandmother at night school, cramming for law exams together in downtown Brooklyn. They did not leave the city by choice - my great-grandfather had landed on the defense team for the Rosenberg trial, and his son was having trouble finding legal work as a result; things were better out West. My grandmother refused to learn to drive for years. Ten years ago, I felt as distraught and hard-jawed as if we had never migrated. In the mythological story passed down through that side of my family, the city was as essential to our identity as brisket. The hyperbole about tractor beams and magnets being able to pull you to a place felt real to me at the time.
I moved away from New York last year for a work project, and I felt immediately and utterly that I had made the wrong decision. I felt lovelorn, so much so that I started to take on the look of a divorcee; pale, waifish, sunken eyes. I spent so much time on Amtrak getting back to the city on weekends that I have memorized the landscape of rural Delaware. Some weekends I had plans, but most I came here just to walk around the streets, buy an apple from a street cart, visit a museum, feel like a local. I imagined I was on an exchange program or part of some rogue anthropological mission and that I would be home soon. And due to a fortunate turn of events, I was.
I may not live in the city forever. It is a difficult place to raise a family, to have a semblance of the adult life we envision without a McDuck vault full of diving coins. I sometimes feel phantom bed bugs, and have caught myself late at night in the back gardens of no-name bars whining about things not being “what they used to be,” referring to a time I never lived through. Like many New Yorkers caught in the provincial feedback loop, I have sworn eternal allegiance. But nothing is predictable. Pop songs can be interrupted.
Still, every year around this day, I think about everyone else who has felt the tractor beam — to pursue to the impossible, to make and create, to reinvent, to disappear, to feel power, to escape power, to tightrope across the towers, to go to sleep hearing 8 million heartbeats at once — and I am so glad I made it from our old beat up Volvo to right here.
