Content warning: suicidal ideation

It’s 2006, maybe. I’m 25. The gas station clerk is gabbing with a state cop about the heroics of first responders. All I want is my coffee. She tells me, in the hushed reverence reserved for church: “I’ll never forget where I was when the towers fell.” The man with greasy hair has finished filling the tank on his moped and echoes the sentiment. While I pay, they lose themselves in remembrance.

They don’t notice when I leave.

Admission: I remember and feel very little about the events of 9/11.

Before you gasp, before you throw your rocks, know that this isn’t about any lack of sympathy for those affected by that terrible day. It’s about where I was, and who I was, then.

Allow me to explain.

Of course I’ve seen the towers fall. Who hasn’t? Every year, there are the airplanes, and still photos of the man cartwheeling toward the street so far below, and the conflagration in the window from which he jumped. There are tributes to the brave men and women who ran into the building while others were running out. Terrified onlookers covered in smoke and the ashes of human remains. War coming to us, death to ours.

And people feel. Normal people feel. Right? They feel for the victims, for the survivors, for an entire city. They feel what they felt as they watched it unfold the first time. The images transport them back to that day, and they are once again shocked, confused, and scared out of their minds.

But if somebody knows where I was when the towers fell, it’s not me.

I mean, I can guess where I was, approximately, given the date. In 2001, I was 20 years old, which meant I had already dropped out of college due to extreme anxiety. At age 20 in September, I was a year and a half past being raped, and a year and a month past the prosecutor accepting a plea deal that gave the rapist “time served.” I was roughly a year and eight months out from the breakup with the first man I ever loved. The only man, it would turn out.

My friends and family act as my memory during this time; the historians who try to help me piece together what my life was like then. “When your sister moved out for fear of finding you dead, you lived in this apartment.” “We bought you the trailer in this month, because you refused to come home.” “Your sister didn’t recognize you when you went to her graduation.” “You stayed in bed that whole year. You lost 75 pounds.”

You stayed in bed that whole year. You lost 75 pounds.

That was 2001. The year depression chewed my life, and swallowed my life, and regurgitated my life in gray.

Here’s what I personally know of myself, circa September 11, 2001: I was 20 years old, just barely, and I thought I had lost it all. Looking back, I recall just three memories from that time.

One. I get out of bed long enough to spread mayonnaise on a piece of white bread, and to make a sandwich of the cheap round turkey somebody had put in my refrigerator. I go back to bed.

Two. I am awake, briefly, and sit on the end of the couch. The television is off, and I stare without seeing in the direction of the door.

Three. One of the adjacent apartments becomes infested with bugs, and they invade our place. Maggots cover the ceiling. My mother tells me that was the last straw; they move me out the next day.

Here’s what I do not remember — the nationwide tragedy that is now simply known by its date: 9/11. At least, not in the way others seem to remember it.

A small story within a story: Toward the end of this somehow excruciating nothing, I tried to escape. I ate nearly 200 pills. I remember counting them then, but I forget the exact number. I ate enough pills to end my depression forever. Then I called a friend and asked her to wait with me until I died. My parents tell me my skin was gray.

Obviously, the friend found a way to get my address and to send help, and the doctor told my family if I lived through the night, I’d probably be fine. I lived, and a new psychiatrist detoxed me off of the 11 psychiatric medications my old psychiatrist had put me on. I had to be kept inpatient for some time.

Of course I’ve seen the towers fall. Who hasn’t?
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After that, we tried every form of therapy there was to draw me forth from the nearly catatonic nowhere in which I lived. Eventually, something (or things) worked well enough to get me out of bed and eating again. I returned to, and finished, college and received a graduate degree. Though I still struggle with depression, I’ve never fallen as far into the void as I was then.

Here’s why this story matters. While I was detoxing, I was smoking a cigarette (patients still got smoke breaks then), and then I was on a mattress on a floor, puking into a trash can. Six hours later. I’d had a seizure.

And that feeling — that where am I, when is it, why am I here confusion — that, for me, is 9/11 every year. I remember other people’s memories, and documentarians’ facts, and the constantly replayed videos. There are flashes of memories gathered secondhand, built on stories told to me by others, but it all feels more like dreams between lost time than a narrative. It feels like waking up six hours later, somewhere else.

But what I realize, now, is that this doesn’t mean I am distant from that day. Depression that deep is a purgatory of fear from which one never fully escapes, in the same way that people who lived through the attacks must carry the memory of that day’s terror in their bodies always. Like the guilt of the survivor who just happened to be late, or who had just left the building, or who just managed to live somewhere else, depression is the heaviness of unspeakable dust settling into your skin, and the panic of trying to catch your breath.

I don’t remember the events of that day perfectly, but I see the scars that it left behind. And where I do connect, what seems to make sense, what seems real, is the people. Wide-eyed and staring, trying to run.

The people, dreaming their ways through gray ash.

“I do, but I’d rather hear about what you remember,” I said, turning down the heady beats of the Wu-Tang Clan I’d been introducing him to. (“Auntie! he’d exclaimed, “This is so much better than Drake!”)

Folded up beside me like a blue heron, or an oil rig, my nephew is a coltish six feet tall, and nearly all legs; he took a long time to respond.

“I remember the dinosaur stickers on my bed,” he finally said, softly. When I followed his gaze out the window, I saw the cranes of the Oakland Port, looking themselves like ancient, industrial beasts. I saw the externalized thought, the making-adult of a childhood memory, the attempt to make contact. He startled me by continuing, “—before I knew they were dinosaurs. When you’re that little, you have no memory of learning a thing. You just know it, and that’s it.”

Long after I dropped him off, his revelation boomed inside me.  

You have no memory of learning a thing. You just know it, and that’s it.

I see evidence of this everywhere: sensing danger before it’s visibly apparent, reading a room, attraction (to another body, to an object that shines just right). Those of us who are able-bodied walk around without really thinking about walking around. We’re repositories of composite knowledge, learned by rote because of necessity or habit, much of which sits below, glacially submerged.

Where, I marveled, did he learn that?

My nephew was talking about linguistics, mostly, and motor skills. He was talking about world-building concepts, like space and time. Things you learn through a kind of osmosis. However, my own first responses—how to sense danger, how to read a room, how to tell if I’m attracted to someone or something or not (and immediately after, if I think the attraction is a good idea or a potentially harmful one)—shows a lot about me as a person. That I learned at a young age how to intuit threat, and how to defuse, defend, or otherwise navigate it.

Today I woke up and I noticed this: a tomato plant in my backyard has grown around a brick.

As the tomatoes start showing their bashful faces, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this muscle memory. A few weeks ago, someone threw a brick through my front window in Oakland. Yesterday, a man made a gun of his hands and pretended to shoot me with it. Down the street, MacArthur Bart is still sewed up with yellow police tape, and Nia Wilson has officially been gone for a week. Down the other side of the street, tent cities bloom and die, bloom and die. Civilians and cops circle one another warily.

Humans are repositories of composite knowledge, learned by rote because of necessity or habit, much of which sits below, glacially submerged.
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And it’s the twentieth anniversary of the release of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, which reminds us that this systemic racism, this cyclical grief, is not even remotely new.

Even if we didn’t cognitively know that to be true, we feel it. The muscle memory of collective trauma prompts us to slide into unconscious action and movement during times like these. We check in with each other more. We shut down ICE facilities. We write, we draw, we archive, we connect.

“There are many ways to show up for a revolution,” my very wise friend Ste once told me. “Jesus and Gloria Anzaldua feed people. Holding a sign is just one way.”

Do you ever feel uncomfortable with how comfortable we can go from zero to 60, and quickly? As if our lives depended upon it (they do). This response is an infinitely helpful one, of course, but it implies a world that is rife with disaster and destruction, one in which an emergency kit must always be at the ready.

I recognize that not everyone feels this way. In fact, it seems to me that the majority of the burden of showing up, educating, and emotional labor falls on marginalized communities, even within liberal and artistic spaces. I understand that the disenfranchised have a more robust understanding of how to handle crisis—for obvious reasons—but our collective inability to have difficult conversations and engage in difficult labor is what landed us with the president and administration we have now.

#MeToo is perhaps a relevant and ongoing example I can point to. While I feel grateful and slain by those in my community (and those in positions of power outside my community) who came forward and told their own harrowing stories, a little part of myself felt distraught: why is it the responsibility of victims to shock the world into caring? Why doesn’t the world just believe people when they claim they’ve been abused? And, even more upsetting, why hasn’t the movement gone farther? What will it take to end rape culture in our country?

Still, some changes are palpable. Holding people publicly accountable is pretty effective. As I enter into the film and television industry—I’m currently taking my first screenwriting course—I can detect the ways in which Hollywood is trying to change its tune.

Nia Wilson’s killer has been apprehended, and folks are still unsure if it was racially motivated, and doesn’t that say something about the ways in which the baseline holds up? That white men can still get away with being assumed not racist until proven otherwise, even when they kill people of color in front of dozens of onlookers?

I feel proud of Oakland for showing up. I also feel sad for Oakland.

I feel proud because I love a city that knows how to handle itself with aplomb in a crisis. I feel sad because the hard truth is that the marginalized and traumatized are always taxed and overburdened with responding—with grace and empathy—to ride or die situations. Individually, and systemically.

We’re seeing an appalling display of what unchecked privilege and power can do. Everyday, hundreds of examples: a man going on a spree with a knife on public transportation, our president taunting entire nations over Twitter, Oakland cops taking advantage of underage women.

For all our unconscious super power—for all our psychological spidey-sense of self-protection against impending violence—how do we know when we are in a Reckoning? I’m so ready for the meek to inherit the Earth. I’m so ready for those who instinctively have a realistic understanding of the danger and beauty and tenuousness and finiteness of our world to have some power in deciding how to run it.

My nephew is right, but is also too young (I think, but what do I know?) to fully understand the additional layer of this fraught knowledge, the one that comes with time and experience and, unfortunately, getting roughed up a bit: the things we have no memory of learning as individuals, the things we hold to be the dearest of knowledge—these are very, very different than the things we collectively know as a society.

The overlap in the Venn diagram of understanding what is wrong with the world on an individual versus a systemic level—well. It’s tiny. As a society we don’t share that baseline. And that’s terrifying.

Walking through the streets of my city and seeing it fall all around me really does make me feel like my basement should be stocked with water and canned beans. And it is (thanks to my Virgo sweetheart).

But I’m mostly stocked up with myself: my muscle memory of how to move in a world that feels like a war-zone. I’m stocked up with my phone tree, my books, my plants that grow around evidence of industrialization. I’m stocked up with my capacity for listening, with my compassion, with my chosen family. I’m stocked up with you.

Keep fighting. I love you.

The goodbyes have overturned the horizon and lay bare their seed on fertile ground; there is a pale face receding, framed by a curtained windowpane. He’ll rise, forgetting, but as he slides the curtains open and hears the tinny metal slide of the rings suspending them, he will be flooded with misery, a desire to lay back down in bed.

The light filters through the trees—strange blocks of shadows dance on the wall. Some leaves are bright, mantis-green, backlit by the sun—others are fern-green, muted and shadowed. They tremble on their branches; the burgundy maple tree in the background reminds him of rust or blood. He turns and fingers the sheets where they used to lay, obsessed for many weeks with one another’s bodies.

Her period was intense—thick and streaming out of her. She was afraid of taking anything with hormones, so the copper IUD had rendered one day of every month a kind of horror scene, but in truth he thrilled at the intimacy of it, even as he was repulsed by it. It was hot to the touch, he could almost see steam rise from the rivulets running down her legs. He thinks of a dead rabbit sighing its life into the sky.

The stains of her blood trace their bodies and he can’t bear to throw them out. He decides that the next time he brings someone home he’ll say he’d cut his foot—or his hand. If he decides in the moment it will sound more true.

How do you imagine the future? I often conceive of it in vignettes like this. Although conceive is the wrong word because in truth they come to me—the visions are full-bodied, screaming or sashaying into my consciousness—I don’t have the sensation of creating them.

But why are the imaginings so cruel? Why do I imagine his dread at my recent departure when that departure is not coming. That kind of sadness—those sickening final goodbyes that coat your days in thick grey ash—is currently coiled sleeping, docile as a sun-drunk cat.

I remember reading that you often dream of horrible things so you can psychologically prepare for the very worst things if and when they happen. Like circuit training for your nervous system.

I recently wrote about another one of my morbid fantasies, which involves my brother’s tweed coat and my mother’s grave. My mother was disturbed; she told me she didn’t like experiencing the “shadow of her own death.” I said I understood. But I also knew I’d keep imagining it.

Sometimes the casket is open. Sometimes I sing Celine Dion, choke-laughing at how saccharine and awful the lyrics are, but goddamn they feel good to belt out on the highway. Sometimes my father is crying, unshaven. Rattled and terrified. Sometimes it’s spring and the brightness of the daffodils silhouetted against the late March frost is spectacular; I pick as many as I can hold; I fill her whole casket with them.

It’s one of the hardest days I’ll ever have and I think my mind is trying to help me pre-cope with my own inevitable unraveling. Perhaps if I imagine it 100 different ways, one of them will be close to the truth and when the daffodils rear their rippled yellow heads, I won’t scream into the snow; I will have been here before.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about the dialogue between imagining and forgetting. In truth, both feel predicated on possibility. Imagining lances all kinds of psychological blisters. Adults happily pretend they can forge the future. Self-help books insist that the Universe sees your pining and just might bend to your will.

So go ahead, conjure that piano, that Porsche, that perky-titted blonde; try things on! Change the furniture, the rage, the loss; try pesto instead of that alfredo sauce. Imagine the world being kinder, more just.

Imagine a world that feels less like purgatory—filled with indiscriminate killings, venomous spiders, leaking sphincters, inexplicable rashes, impossible cruelties to children and the environment—and more like a fraught family reunion! We’re all gathered here together for a few days…sort of by our own will! We should all do our best to take care of one another while we’re here and have a good time before heading our separate ways again.

But isn’t forgetting also a kind of imagining?

I’ve been reading a lot about amnesia recently. The Mayo Clinic breaks it down into three types: The first is retrograde amnesia (difficulty remembering the past, things that were once so familiar), and the second is anterograde, which is difficulty learning new information. These two are caused, of course, by a delectable variety of absolutely terrible things from brain swelling and alcohol abuse to seizures and tumors—you get the idea, the human body is nothing if not fragile as a paper mache egg…but the kind of amnesia I’m interested in is the more rare, dissociative, or psychogenic amnesia, induced by trauma.

The brain protects itself from remembering something awful. And in this void, in this once-was-pain space, we find another kind of imagining. A place where that thing never happened. You can imagine a life that isn’t marred by the inky edges of darkness; violence, death, depression. The mind, knowing what it does to your poor heart, to your central nervous system, to your bowels which run with ice when you remember—tidily blurs those edges until the memory is gauze.

It helps you imagine a better past. It is, of course, often not much more than a fleeting parlor trick—the memories course back and crush you—but it’s a lovely respite.

Isn’t forgetting a kind of imagining?
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My fascinating if mildly morbid research started because I couldn’t remember having sex with my ex boyfriend. I realize this is a trivial thing in many ways, but it started to eat at me. It was a small, but potent and disconcerting void. It was as though someone had come in with kindergarten scissors and started sloppily snipping those memories away. Like that very sad, very wonderful movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Did I bring the scissors? Did I wear a stocking on my head—my features mashed against the silk mesh—and start lopping out our love making?

…and then I realized I was relieved. In part. It is both the cruelest and most lovely of gifts. To forget his face and hands and feet. It’s like losing time—the minutes that made hours which made days and weeks—simply vanished.

I started looking at the few photographs I had of his naked body. I’ve always wondered if post break-up one is even allowed to do that…but I suppose if you remember their body in your mind it’s tantamount to the same thing, but I didn’t anymore. So was it a violation?

I started to scroll—that eerily familiar sensation of thumb-sliding, a gesture once awkward and unimaginable now ubiquitous—and stare at his limbs, trying to conjure what once felt like an extension of my own body.

I suppose my mind is willfully forgetting so I can move on. His whole body is a scar that’s blistered and ran and is just a bumpy ridge I run my fingers over in the dark; I can’t really feel or see it, there’s just a shape where he once was.

And now? I’m busy imagining more goodbyes; I’m imagining the void that my absence will bring to another person’s life. We’ve only just begun and I already need to forget.