X Ray Retro Spex

 With this amazing pair of X-Ray Retro-Spex I can see into the center of things that are no longer there. I can spend hours watching empty space.

I did my pilgrimage.

I took the East River Ferry to Wall Street and walked to Church and Vesey. This is where our store was. Right now there is something that looks like a funhouse there.

The proposed new 2WTC will be where the old 5WTC was. 2WTC will be a second tower. You Are Here, says the map.

Stage Door Deli is still around the corner and I got breakfast to go — eggs and bacon all the way — and took it to Zuccotti Park. Sam’s Falafel is still there. This is where Occupy Wall Street started ten years ago.

I took pictures of these places and then I walked home, following the route I took when the towers were burning and I fled with the cosmopolitan multitude. We would turn our heads to see the burning skyline and then look at each other, thousands of strangers on the streets of Manhattan, looking into each other’s eyes, something never known to have happened in New York

Up Church until the second plane and then ran to West Broadway through Tribeca to Soho and Grand to Chinatown and Lower East Side and Clinton to Delancey and over the Williamsburg Bridge where I first saw that only one tower still stood and didn’t know why. By the time I got to Metropolitan the second tower was also gone.

Absent buildings and absent people continue to cast long shadows.

Maybe you really become a New Yorker when the New York you’ve come to know is no longer there.

The day after my pilgrimage I felt beat down, like one of those towers left its monster footprint on my back.

This spot where I am sitting now, a futon sofa, was where the hospital bed was when she died and where I look out the window and see the two beams of light that stream upward through empty sky. 

September 16, oh yeah, is our anniversary, and I feel beat down.