Today is September 11th and New York is on my mind.
But maybe not for the same reasons it’s on everyone else’s mind. I mean, yes, I woke up this morning and watched 9/11 coverage on CNN.com and remembered that I was in Latin class when I heard The News ten years ago and that I didn’t quite Get It at the time. I remembered driving past Ground Zero and the Pentagon in October or November 2001 and seeing it for myself and still not really Getting It. But I think ten years and a couple of wars later, and after hearing those kids who lost their parents read their parents’ names at the memorial this morning, I Get It. And I don’t want to watch any more of it. It’s hard.
Painful moments in history during my lifetime aside, I head back to Long Island tomorrow morning which kicks off my next few months of… spending a lot of time Long Island. When I’m gone during the week, sometimes it feels like I have one foot in one life and one in another because neither of those lives seems to know much about the other. I feel like I miss a lot, but I also experience a lot, so I guess it’s a trade-off. I’ve had a blast running all over the country this summer and going all these places and seeing all these people and doing all these things I didn’t think I’d get to go/see/do for a long time—much less pack into one summer. It’s been kind of fascinating, particularly, catching up with friends who have moved on and seeing how they’re living their lives. It makes me think about my own life and changes that I might want to make. And as much as I love being home, I’m finding less and less that I get that itch to come back when I’ve been gone for a bit, I think because the concept of home is becoming a little more portable. And because I learn a lot about myself and how I function every time I’m dropped off in a new city with new people and a new hotel room and a new car, and I think that’s important.
There’s a whole list of things I want to do over the next few months while I’m hanging out in the northeast. There’s another list of things I want to make sure I keep intact at home while I do this. Hopefully those are the kinds of things you’ll be seeing in this Tumblr for a while.
- 8 months ago
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