It was 2001 and as was the case with nearly every weekday morning, I was likely watching “The Golden Girls” before heading off to class. I imagine that the moments before the emergency broadcast broke through Blanche’s southern drawl and all the canned laughter, I was pacing around my dusty studio apartment in a Victoria’s Secret bra and panties, trying to sort out what to wear on one of those fickle pre-fall days in D.C., when it’s cooler in the mornings and blistering by noon.
I would have saved my money, hard earned at my jobs at the GAP and private party waitressing, to buy my matching undergarments. I barely remember this bit, but I’m sure the bra had padding, and the panties were covered in itchy lace. I know the word panties didn’t bother me back then, and it doesn’t irk me now, but there was a stretch in my thirties when I couldn’t even say it. I know that the implications of words and also, my appearance, were more and less important during this time.
My morning coffee might have been purchased from the vendor who peddled his Styrofoam encased caffeine by the Metro stop a few blocks away, or I may have made it in the shitty, old second-hand machine in my apartment. I was twenty and used Sweet’N Low and skim milk because I thought it was more important to try and be skinny than it was to enjoy the taste of things. Plus, I reserved by calories for Stoli Citron, Jamba Juice, and pot brownies.
Just before the phone lines stopped working, I would have been shoving doodle-filled notebooks into a paint splattered leather messenger bag and trying to find my platform Steve Madden sandals underneath my carefully made bed.
Before I noticed my television screen, I heard unusual noise outside the large window that looked out on 25th Street. I sat at that window countless times over a nearly three-year period, pregaming with Georgi vodka in a plastic bottle mixed with Sunrise Crystal Light, pretending I knew how to smoke a Marlboro Ultra-Light, and ugly crying over the deficient men I picked and then, obsessed over. I knew what the world sounded like outside of my window. The hum of traffic and the shuffle of backpack clad college students. Early morning workers and late night grifters. Takeout delivery and booty calls.
I could tell you now that what I heard sounded like panic, but I’m aware that’s hindsight coloring my memory. It was just, different. Peering out my window, I saw cars driving over the divider that led to Georgetown, and people of all ilk running down the street. Away, they appeared to be running away.
My apartment phone rang, and I picked it up, hearing my father’s voice on the other end. Are you okay? He asked. I don’t remember how I responded, but I’m sure I was confused. Okay? Yes. I was okay. I know that I didn’t have the chance to get out too many words before the line went dead. I remember that I thought I had left the handset off the base for too long and it had died. I did that. Often. I remember trying my cell, because it was still just before the chargeable minutes hour, and that wasn’t working either. I remember that’s when I started to feel something that I would call uneasy, now.
I remember getting dressed and walking to my friends’ apartment building. I recall that the feeling in the air was palpable. Terror. At some point I was told that the Pentagon was “hit,” and someone showed me the billowing smoke that was visible across the Potomac. I knew that the Towers were hit in New York City, and I thought of my home, and my friends and family.
We didn’t have classes for days and then, we did, and then the anthrax attacks began, and they put sharp shooters on top of our school buildings. Then, we waited, again. And wrung our hands. And cried. A lot. We were seniors and had to graduate and also, we wanted to live.
My brain was filled with thoughts about incompetent leadership and also, the people who inadvertently become the kind of leaders who inspire for years after they hold a position of influence of authority. On my mind was early graduation from college and a move to Europe during a time when boarding a plane was a terrifying prospect, also, how to find a job (with health insurance!) in a crashed economy. Then there were all the things that nearly twenty-one-year-olds thought about in 2001, like drinking legally and significant others, flattering haircuts, overpriced denim, and the legality of downloading music off Napster.
What I remember more than anything is that I didn’t have to worry by myself, because there was this beautiful, tragic collective anxiety that pervaded the air. We were all in it together. The strain, the stress, the unknown, the terrifying known.
And yes, people have written about this before. Nearly everyone has at least one “where did all our group love go?” post or story or contemplative essay. So, this isn’t utterly original, but it’s on my mind, and so, I’m saying it.
What the fuck is going on?
No one made people hateful and divisive in 2016 or 2024 or 2025. We’ve been here for a long time, baby. We’ve been cooking up racism, misogyny, homophobia, and all the other hate for decades. Sure, we’ve found more innovative ways to destroy each other, like social media, but the baseless hatred has been around and around and around.
I think (also unoriginal), people just feel really comfortable with a lack of decorum, now. I think that our so-called leaders on all sides, have given everyone permission to just let the worst of themselves hang out there, for everyone to see. And sure, on one level, that’s great, because it’s visible and we can easily fuck with what we know. And on the other hand, I’m not seeing that we are solving any massive problems we have with this highly visible and incredibly dangerous animosity. It feels like we are just creeping closer and closer to what I imagine is going to be a civil war, or some event that takes us to our knees.
I didn’t like Charlie Kirk, at all. I’m not going to pretend that I even touted him as a family man. His values were something that gave me the creeps, to be honest. And as for the pro-Israel stance, that felt like propaganda to me. There, I said it. My Jewishness didn’t give me the Charlie Kirk carve-out. And you know what happened when I found out about the absolutely catastrophic tragedy that occurred yesterday? I got choked up. I felt devasted for this young man and his loved ones. I mourned this broken country of ours. A country that sees a fatal shooting, an assassination, as a tool for grandstanding. A country that uses this senseless act as a way to say: SEE, we told you. Guns are bad. People need guns to defend themselves. Trans people are bad. Black and brown people are bad. Leftists are bad. Far-right is bad. People are too right leaning. People are too woke.
WOW.
Perhaps let his family mourn their loss. Let this man, flawed as he may have been, be buried in the way in which he never conceptualized, having not even reached proper middle age.
What are we actually doing? When I think about this day, as New Yorker, as an American, 9/11, when our country experienced unfathomable loss and found a way to love each other, I’m perplexed why we can’t find a way to stop hating each other and publicizing that hatred. Why everything deserves a scapegoat, and someone to blame, and some policy to tout and some platform to scream from.
Maybe, just maybe, we can be sad that we can’t learn without being taken to our collective knees. Maybe we can be regretful that things have to get worse before there’s even a light that’s visible. Maybe I was selfish to think about graduating college in the wake of such a storm, or maybe I was twenty years old, and so scared, that everything felt like a thing.
Maybe our fear is the most human part of us, and when we layer anger and blame on top of that fear to assuage it, we only build it and give it a name and then, alchemize it, to use it for evil.
Maybe, just maybe, we are the problem after all, so maybe, we are also going to have to be the solution.
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