Unedited memories

September 2001. High on weekends.
Homeless so to speak.
inbetween cities
inbetween life
I ran away
I stumbled. hesitated. fractured into too many pieces.
unable to contain them all – but one got away.
I’m still looking for that piece
images, flashes, deformities and laughless.
It was a movie I thought.
I was watching a movie and I thought briefly that I was in a movie watching this movie of two towers blowing up. falling down.
I’m in a starngers house.
His sister calls from LA
We realize we are watching NY
This is not a movie.
I am not in a movie.
I am in a city that I once lived in but one week ago.
It is Saturday afternoon.
He speaks to his sister.
I watch the screen.
Silent.
Separated.
fuck.
I don’t want to remember right now.
It’s painful.
I have not forgotten.
I had one cousin living 10 blocks from the epicentre and another cousin, her sister visiting her from OH.
Everyone felt guilty that night for dancing.
We were all sad.
Another while on the phone that morning while speaking to his client his phone went dead.
Dead. NY.
The clients voice gone.
No disconnection,
cousins running around grey in the aftermath.
husband somwhere near.
A week before
I did not look back
I didn’t look back.
I never looked back.
and I have never forgotton.

On September second of 2001 I left my husband of whom I had been living with for 8 years. Three of those years we were married. Three days before my third wedding anniversary I packed up and moved back to my hometown of Saint John. I began a routine that lasted monthes of travelling back and forth between two cities on the weekends to be with my friends. I lived with my parents during the week in Saint John while looking for work in the design industry. I left it all behind in Fredericton. My clients. My life. My marriage. I travelled back only to party on weekends. September fifth 2006, would have marked eight years of marriage for me. In 1997 my appendix ruptured and had been rotting for months from chron’s disease.

I don’t know how to put to words what is going on in my head today or for the last couple of weeks. I have been silently living, waiting, hoping that I get through this September without death, without fear, without sickness… and without doing drugs to blind my emotions from it all.

If there is anything that I have learned from remembering memories is that life and death will continue to co-exist for as long as we exist and remember it. I am sitting here smoking cigarettes, crying a little because my dog “moochie” died back east at my parents place and I live on the opposite side of Canada.

Just quiet. These are my late August and early September memories

My mind is pretty full most of the time. It’s runs around and I have to run after it. The past couple of weeks though I am not running. I am just living. At any instant things could change but I am not going to worry about what could happen nor will I forget about what happened. Right now I just am…. smoking a cigarette, drinking pepsi reading and writing.