When I woke on the day in question, everything was already destroyed, gone. The world as I knew it, as I wanted to know it, ended. The previous night I drank with the people who were my family until we were dancing on the tables. It was the last time we were all in the same room at the same time. When dawn alit the horizon, we stumbled forth towards the Earth’s far flung corners.
When I woke on the day in question, I could sense a hammering. For a moment I could not tell, was the pounding was in my head or was it someone at my bedroom door? It was, in fact, my sister, Kristin, coming to rouse me sometime in the late morning. I did not want to face the day and its gloomy prospects, but Kristin urged me on, so dutifully I woke and dressed, already armored with the knowledge that the world to which I bid goodnight was not the one I rose to meet.
When I woke on the day in question, I knew I was facing a scenario similar to the one I faced when my first academic campaign met its end in the trenches. With the battle lost, I left it there to die, neglected. Soon after I abandoned Academia, I settled into a rut. It was a comfortable place lodged between afternoon bongloads and nightly beer binges. The existence in this space, however, was one without meaning, a fact that depressed me. This depression served only to reinforce my behaviors. I began to question my worth. My self esteem suffered.
I was filled with fear and doubt, anxiety and angst; like when I woke on the day in question, rising from bed was a chore. I was lost. I did not know who I was or where I was going. Securely snared in the financial safety net supplied by my parents, I lolled through a season-long employment search without urgency or success. It was a malaise-fed spring.
That summer a friend, Jessica, fled town to pursue her own adventures. In leaving, she offered me her job washing dishes at a local restaurant. I gladly accepted. Soon after, the general trend of my life reversed. I still drank beer, and I still got high, but I had a reason to get up in the afternoon: I was a member of a tight-knit crew at the area’s best restaurant.
I began to hang out on my days off. My co-workers were a clandestine extended family. They helped me climb out of depression. They aided me through my life’s most difficult transition. These were the first people to whom I was openly gay. I grew so attached to these people that I got an emblem representing the restaurant, a Z, tattooed on my arm. The good times left a permanent mark.
We knew we were a success because we had the best cuisine and the best booze. We celebrated our greatness by partaking in the latter. As Summer slid into Fall, so too slid the restaurant’s finances. An underrated artistic endeavor such as ours found no purchase in the depressed economy of Bellingham, Washington.
Our unrecognized greatness made being in that place at that time seem even more magical. We knew reality would end our reverie, but we faced our imminent doom by ignoring it. We embraced the transience of the experience by pretending it might last forever. We did not allow the specter of uncertainty and unemployment crash our party. The party climaxed on the eve of the day in question. When the doors closed for the final time, so did that chapter of my life. To remind me of what I lost on that day, I got the Z tattoo on the anniversary of the day in question. It was as good a day as any to feel the pain, I figured.
The eve of the day in question was September 10th, 2001, so when my sister came to wake me the next morning, it was with good reason. When she described to me what had happened, my addled mind could not make sense of it. I could not comprehend the words. I simply laid in bed aware only of my own immediate misery.
When I woke on the day in question the second tower had already collapsed. The safety and warmth of certain light in my own life had already been extinguished. When I woke and dressed, I knew the world to which I bid goodnight was not the one I rose to face. I could not, however, understand the meaning of what I faced that day. No single person could possibly understand the magnitude of what they were witnessing.
On the day in question I realized that day that was a day important not only to my personal narrative, but one important to the narrative of humanity at large. When I chose to get tattooed on the anniversary of the day in question, I knew the pain it inflicted was not mine to own.
