9/11 Reflections (T-Minus 187 Days)

Like the majority of Americans, I have spent much of this week reflecting back of September 11, 2001, and everything that has happened in the past 10 years. In the last decade, I have occasionally thought back to that day, remembering where I was, what I was wearing and how the events unfolded as they pertained to me.

I was in my sophomore year of college, five minutes outside of Washington, D.C., and had missed several calls from my mom while in class. I couldn’t get back to her, but I moved onto French class until I finally gave into the sinking feeling in my stomach something was wrong and walked back to the dorm.

It was then, while walking in grey sweatpants, my favorite Maryland lacrosse tshirt and flip-flops, my phone rang again and my mom asked me if I had seen the news and when I said no, she told me there had been terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. By this point, it was hours after the fact and by the time I got to a television, the towers were gone, the Pentagon had a gaping hole, a field in Pennsylvania was obliterated and all that was left were seemingly apocalyptic images.

From high points on campus, you could see smoke from the fires at the Pentagon and, as my New York/New Jersey/Connecticut friends heard from family members, the tragedy began to hit closer to home. As a journalism major and current affairs junkie, I spent the next few days watching the news with morbid curiosity.  

This would go on for just over a week until a much smaller, but still devastating, event literally hit home. A tornado ripped through the University of Maryland campus, the first in the DC area in nearly a century, knocking out power, taking down buildings, clearing trees and claiming the lives of two. Selfishly, there were suddenly other things I needed to worry about other than the aftermath of Sept. 11.

Not until this 10-year anniversary, however, did I realize just how much I missed.

I am not ashamed to admit I have been mildly addicted to much of the commemorative programming this week. I have been sucked into shows on National Geographic, History Channel and CNN. I have wept over commercials, musical performances and the national anthem. I don’t even dare listen to “Proud to be an American” or else I will be down for the count.

Anyway, through watching all these shows, I realize how much must have come out during the time I was otherwise occupied. The pieced together timelines, first-hand accounts and sobering realizations as sense began to be made were all new to me. I also was reminded of the patriotism that ensued in the weeks and even years following; a blissful phenomenon all but erased by the economic meltdown and overwhelmingly partisan politics we currently live with.

We are constantly told to never take days for granted and to always tell people who you love how you feel because you never know when you will no longer have the chance. There could be no greater reminder of that than watching the events of Sept. 11 unfold and hearing all the surrounding stories. And so I woke up today, not with grandiose ideas of proclaiming affection or living dangerously, but of simply doing something, anything, I had been putting off.

Because you never know when you will no longer have the chance.

I ended up working the majority of the day, but with just over an hour remaining in the day, I have a letter to write. And tomorrow, a boy to ask out. 

Baby Steps (T-Minus 191 Days)

It was around this time a year ago I learned something very important about myself.

I had been stuck in the weirdly undefined pseudo-relationship with Mr. NDNS (Neither Defined Nor Satisfying if you’re late to this party) for over a year and was pretty much at a loss as to what to do about it. Other than, you know, define it and lose the pseudo, but that would have made too much sense. Anyway, he had apparently had enough of it as well and I heard through the grapevine he had articulated to a mutual friend his realization we needed to talk about the state of our relationship.

So what did I do? I panicked and I slept with someone else.

I had recently reconnected with an old friend who was headed through the area on a road trip and wanted to know if I had any interest in getting together for the night (yes … as in the biblical sense). I had very little intention of saying yes, at least until I was faced with the alternative of actually figuring out my life, and so I found myself agreeing to a late-night Labor Day rendez-vous in a seedy airport hotel.

I had a bit of drive for the booty call, and I passed the time talking to an old friend, trying to explain the thought process behind making the decision to sleep with someone other than the man I had been saying could be The One for months. To be honest, I wish I had recorded it because I’d really like to recall how I made sense of that one.

My friend told me I was being a completely self-destructive idiot and to turn the car around. To go home, go to sleep and wake up the next day ready to face my future. I, however, opted to keep driving and have seedy hotel sex. And then ignore NDNF’s phone call and voicemail the following morning.

I would regret it later, but I deleted the message without even listening. It might have been something completely innocuous, but on the off chance he actually was ready to talk, I guess I just wasn’t ready to hear what he had to say.

As you know, neither one of us would bring it up again. And, after the high of my illicit night died down, I would spend many more months wondering what might have been.

So what is this important lesson?

It is something you have probably inferred by now, but it was the moment I realized I am completely jacked up emotionally. The friend on the phone, who will get his own entry one of these days, told me I have the most severe “daddy issues” of anyone with a completely normal father and family he has ever met.

It’s really easy to disguise commitment-phobia when you have a steady string of men in your life (not always in the biblical sense; I’m not a hussy). I wrote, at some length, about my proclivity for the unattainable back in the July 4 entry on a Declaration of Desired Dependence. It was in this moment a year ago I began exploring and trying to understand the phenomenon and my penchant for the geographically undesirable, selfishly unworthy, romantically unavailable, professionally unethical, aesthetically unachievable and/or unabashedly uninterested.

It's been a long road since.

The jury is still out on whether I found someone that breaks this cycle. Things are still very much undefined and I have to fight my inclination to keep them that way. For now though, I am enjoying the process and have no intention of self-destructing and ruining it with a spontaneous stupid decision.

Baby steps.