Relative Ambivalence
I feel like there is too much information coming in at once.
I don’t really want to write an online entry. It will seem as though I am simply eliciting pity and / or sounding melodramatic when I really am and want anything but. I first switched on the television, minutes after the first strike occurred, to stare in wide-eyed amazement at the smoking building. At a loss, really. The first strike hit. Then the second. Collapse; walk to class; collapse. The reality of the situation didn’t hit me until - en route - I bumped into a colleague of mine. I greeted him with a “can you fucking believe it?” I pressed the elevator button with my thumb. My question was met with red wet eyes.
“You know, you may be smiling, but I’m from Manhattan and my family lives in New York.”
I didn’t mean to smile.
After 11:30, Classes were cancelled.
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Should I lament the devastation? Should it strike a chord? Truth is, I don’t know how I feel. I see pictures on a screen. How much of my reaction is sincere and how much of it is manifest? Do I feel bad out of obligation to feel bad or do I really feel bad? It’s so hard for me to tell when one ends and one begins. I feel so ungenuine. The experience isn’t tactile. Have I become desensitized?
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My brother called me tonight. The one I am so estranged with, averse to, uncomfortable around. I was surprised at the concern - was it rational? Does he care? Is he going through the motions? Everyone seems so concerned and tense but I question the unease. I mean, people from high school are IM-ing me . . . ones who have never contacted me since high school. They pummel me with sad faces and small words and I don’t know what to think. Am I touched? Should I be touched? Or do they just want my human interest story?So I wonder if I am getting these messages because I am the one physically closest to the wreck.
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I called my dad this morning. After the second plane, I dialed the necessarily access codes and area codes and seven digits to wake him up at 8:30 am, central time.In my broken Chinese, I woke him. The World Trade Center. Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center. Into the buildings, dad. Doesn’t our cousin work there. Vanessa. Vanessa works there. In New York, dad. The World Trade Center. Don’t worry about it. And he hung up the phone.I frustrated my father with my fragmented speech. A speech that my brother would ask for me to remember and repeat for him. How do you say plane in Chinese? Did you know how to say ‘World Trade Center?’ Ha ha, he mused. I feel, even in this moment of sympathy, he is criticizing my smallness.But how small must I really be to think so critically of an open gesture?
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My mom would always tell me, “the transportation system goes directly to the place. All you have to do is ride the elevator to the 10th and say hello.”This is how I remember that Vanessa worked there. But it turns out I always heard my mother wrong.She worked on the 100th.I called home twice more tonight. Still missing.
My human interest story.
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I think about plays I’ve seen. Ones where there would be an ailing patient of some incurable disease. Ones where said patient would have a loved one watching the tragedy unfold. Ones where the loved one would have a moment to address the audience. They would say something to the effect of “and even though Bobby is the one with a leukemia slowly poisoning his body; even though he is the one staring vacantly at ceilings with needles in his veins and tubes going through all of his orifices . . . the one comatose and dying . . . you know, I was hurting too.”On the last line, my eyes would always narrow into tiny slits.
Fuck you.How selfish.I don’t know exactly where I was going with this.
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So where will I be, what will I think, what shall I do, when this all subsides?There is too much information coming in at once.
