The fact that I lived in downtown Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, is the foremost reason I feel okay about calling myself a New Yorker. I wasn’t going to post anything about it, but Heather Anne’s beautiful, tear-inducing post about her memories from that day inspired me. I think most people, when hearing that I was in New York on 9/11, less than 2 miles from the Twin Towers, expect that I have a story like hers. I don’t.

It’s hard to believe it’s been nine years. I moved to New York from Georgia in August, 2001, to start college at NYU. Below is something I wrote several years later, about my experience on September 11th. It’s not the whole story. There were also the vigils, the way you could suddenly look into the eyes of strangers on the street and feel deeply connected to them, as if it were a tiny town where you knew everyone and could completely relate to their experience and not a sprawling metropolis where people came from all over and never looked one another in the eyes while walking down the street anyway, and how upset some people (who weren’t there) got when I said I thought we had partly brought this violence on ourselves, and how I was accused of being unpatriotic, and how I didn’t look at the TV footage again, after seeing the towers fall the first time, for over a year, and I still cry when I see it, and how I was staying at a hotel at the World Trade Center, a just days before the attacks, and that hotel was destroyed but I still have the plastic room key, and how while I was hitch-hiking around the country, every single person who picked us up, when they found out I had Been There, wanted to hear me tell my story about what it was really like to Be There, and I told them all the details I could remember, but not the part I wrote about below.

. . .

The truth is that some us who were there didn’t process it immediately either. We were in shock. I didn’t get it, rolling out of my little NYU dorm bed that morning and dragging myself toward the shower. Neither did my roommate, who intercepted me on my way to the bathroom and told me about this freak accident on TV.

I just took my shower. For some reason, it didn’t occur to me to turn on the TV myself, or to go outside to look, even though it was completely visible from my street.

Even when I was interrupted again, putting on my make-up, and told about the second plane, even when I turned on my own TV, even when I walked outside and looked up in the sky…

I just walked on to class. For some reason, it didn’t occur to me not to go to class.

People were walking backwards down the street, so they could see the cloud of smoke coming from the towers. People were talking on their cell phones.

My chemistry professor had been teaching since six AM. No one told him. I heard later that in other classes, people had rushed in, told them to turn on their TVs. Not in mine.

I just sat there and took my notes, like any other Tuesday.

Afterwards, when I was walking back to my dorm, people were still standing in the sidewalk, talking on their cell phones. The smoke had spread out, and I had somehow gotten disoriented. I’d been staring straight at them only an hour ago, but I’d only lived in New York a month, and in the midst of all this drama, I’d completely forgotten where the Twin Towers were.

I really, honestly thought it was just me. It never occurred to me that what had happened while I was in class could have happened.

Back in my dorm, everyone was standing in the lobby watching the TV. They shooed us away into the lounge, in front of the big screen. We were just a couple miles away from the “accident,” and when they showed the footage, we didn’t realize it wasn’t live. We, too, saw the towers collapse on television.

I walked down Broadway. Empty, carless, below-14th-Street Broadway. My friends snapped photos of the cloud. I didn’t. I never took a single shot. I never went down to Ground Zero. I sniffed the burnt stationary acquaintances brought back.

The next morning, my room smelled like ashes. There were only a handful of students left in my dorm, which was under threat of evacuation.

Because I lacked one of the surgical masks that were suddenly all the rage in the NY fashion scene, I went out with a scarf around my face. I tried to give blood, but even though I was type-O, they turned me away. They said they’d contact me when I could come back. They did, two months later.

Instead of watching it on TV, or engaging in the act of Not Watching It On TV, a good friend of mine actually went to try to help. He’d volunteered at a nearby hospital over the summer, and thought they’d need all the extras they could get. So he went, and he sat in a big room full of all these doctors and nurses and good people like him from all over, all ready and waiting for the injured to start pouring in. They waited there all night long. They waited until they realized that they weren’t needed afterall, because there weren’t going to be any injured pouring in. The injured were all dead.

It was then, days later, when he told me this story, that I finally got it. I understood what had happened, not because I Was There, but because someone was kind enough to tell me.

My mother misses discovering new books all on her own, without reading anything about them or their authors in advance. When she was growing up, she chose books off the shelves at the Marietta library based solely on the titles on their spines. There were no pictures on the covers or blurbs on the back or “about the author” pages. She read Of Human Bondage in the fifth grade because she didn’t know what the word ‘bondage’ meant and by the end of the first chapter she was so involved that Maugham became one of “her authors” and she read all his other books too. She started reading Faulkner in the eighth grade because she liked the sound of Sanctuary, and it wasn’t until she was at college and started asking other people if they’d ever read anything by this guy named William Faulkner that she discovered that he was a famous, “great” writer.

. . .

I am still thinking about my habit of thinking that I need to erase or hide the mess of my past in order to start fresh. This has many negative consequences, including the fact that my files are such a disorganized mess. Every time I have an urge to clear off my desktop, I just toss all my old files into a folder labelled “old stuff” and hide it all somewhere, so I can get them out of the way and start my new, organized life with a fresh set of empty folders. After decades of this, it’s terribly difficult to find anything I’m looking for. I have so many different files labelled “writing” or “photographs” or “web” from so many different years, all nested inside each other in a cryptic structure. And my constantly changing web spaces and email addresses and so forth in order to reinvent myself on a blank canvas when I was a teenager also directly lead to my losing vast amounts of data when my abandoned email accounts and Geocities/Tripod accounts and LiveJournals were deleted and purged without having been backed up.

I have the same habit of withdrawing much too completely from “failed” relationships in order that I can “move on,” which I think is related to some of the difficulty I have in remembering the way things were. I throw away much more than is necessary.

One consequence of having my archives organized so opaquely is that when I do start digging, I often discover things I haven’t seen in years. I went on a mining expedition through my hard disk last night and found so many files from 1998 and 1999 that I didn’t realize I still had. All the meticulously hand-coded versions of my first domain, Sarasvati.org, from the days when I wanted to be a web designer. Journal entries that never made it into any content management system later on. Here’s an except from one I wrote when I was fifteen, that clears up the mystery of one of my first online flirtations somewhat:

“‘…no idea if you’re a guy or a gal, hopefully the latter cuz I could love you, and don’t feel like struggling with my sexuality these days, too damn old and busy, heh.”

This quote is from the first email R ever sent me. That was almost a year ago. The email he and I exchanged (in between the day he discovered that loving me could likely land him in prison and the day he ran off to Vegas and married an old friend of his) could easily fill a book. Or two. I’m still planning on publishing (and making a fortune off of) his half, when he dies. He’s quite well worded and interesting. We certainly don’t exchange five or six emails a day anymore, but we still communicate every now and then…”

I don’t have any of that old email anymore, so I am out of luck making my fortune from it. R was more than twice my age, so perhaps he had better back-up habits in 1997. It might be worth trying to contact him (and any number of other people I had intense email-based relationships with before 2003, when I registered my current domain) to see if he still has our correspondence saved on an ancient disk or server somewhere. Though my assumption that the public at large of the future would have an interest in these records was incredibly naive, my self of the future certainly does.

All this is tied into my thinking about making my old journal archives public again, which I am feeling more and more inclined to do (actually my previous wordpress site, with entries back to 1999, is already available, I just haven’t merged it with the present one).

I have several girlfriends I’ve kept in touch with since our very earliest days of writing on the web, in our teens. Some of them no longer have websites at all. But, of those who are still posting journal/blog entries and art/photography on the web, very few of them still have their material from the old days online. They talk of being embarrassed by their early work (even though the rest of the world still seems to love it, me included!) and of no longer feeling comfortable sharing such personal details of their lives with strangers, opting to stick with more focused and less risky material in blogs. Maybe this collective move away from the confessional is a consequence of getting older and less self-involved and more integrated with the world at large. Maybe it’s because now our parents and extended families and employers and students and potential new friends “IRL” and (most especially) the people that we’ve written about are all online, and we want to protect them and ourselves from the consequences of too much information and the “wrong impression.” Those are certainly key reasons I’ve had for taking down old online journals and photos or redacting and password-protecting things. But, for me at least, it’s also related to this (mistaken) idea that who I am now is somehow being defined or constrained by what information from my past is available to others. I want to be in control of all the information out there pertaining to myself (which is, of course, impossible), and I have a deep-seated fear that if everyone knew all my secrets, disaster would fall and I would be adandoned by the people whose love, affection, and respect I desire.

On one level, all of this obsession with my personal archives, much like my thinking (even jokingly) at fifteen that someday I could publish my personal emails as a book and make money from it, is silly, because, of course, no one, except possibly me, has much interest in sifting through all the ephemera of my past and making all sorts of judgments about the present me based on it, and even I (even unemployed!) do not have the time for that. There is too much new work still to be done, too many new stories I still need to write, too much art I still need to make. But I do believe that it is important to continue to examine these strange habits I have in thinking of my past (ranging from feeling oppressed/doomed by my mistakes to thinking that all my “best days” are behind me), because I can’t let go of them if I can’t see them.

(The truth is: in the kingdom of heaven, everything is included.)

“63. How can we enjoy memoirs, believing them to be true, when nothing, as everyone knows, is so unreliable as memory? Many memoirs make a virtue of seeming unadorned, unvarnished, but the first and most unforgettable thing we learn about memory is that it is fallible. Memories, we now know, can be buried, lost, blocked, repressed, even recovered. We remember what suits us, and there’s almost no limit to what we can forget. Only those who keep faithful diaries will know what they were doing at this time, on this day, a year ago. The rest of us recall only the most intense moments, and even these tend to be mythologized by repetition into well-wrought chapters in the story of our lives. To this extent, memoirs really can claim to be modern novels, all the way down to the presence of an unreliable narrator. (25-26)”

“70. As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments. Our lives aren’t prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art — underprocessed, underproduced — splinters and explodes. (27)”

– Reality Hunger, David Shields

I picked up Reality Hunger: A Manifesto at the library yesterday, after noticing that it’s been on the top of the list at The Millions for a while. When I first read Shields’ catch phrase “the lure and blur of the real” it reminded me that I had tuned in for a live web broadcast of the roundtable discussion of the same name he moderated back in March.

The Philoctetes Center, named for that wounded guy with the bow, hosted the discussion with Shields. It’s a non-profit under the auspices of the NY Psychoanalytic Society that promotes interdisciplinary dialogue between artists and scientists. They have a library of conversations (YouTube channel) between smart, interesting people in many fields (including several professors I was acquainted with in the Psychology Department at NYU) on many topics, all available for free online.

Excited to discover that such an organization exists, I wrote a sappy fan email about my struggles with thinking I needed to choose a camp (art or science) since my teens, and stubbornly deciding to choose both. I also spoke to the manager of the place, actor Adam Ludwig, about getting more involved. Of course I enthusiastically promised to send in all sorts of brilliant ideas for new panels they could put together, etc, which I still haven’t gotten around to doing. In any case, they don’t have a lot of funding, and you should donate if you can, to help bring interesting minds together in conversation. Two of the other participants in “The Lure and Blur of the Real” discussion were author Rick Moody and John Cameron Mitchell, director of Shortbus, that film with the non-faked orgy.