I woke up that day the same, sort of, as many other days, with my mom rousing me to wake up and get dressed. I’d just started college a few weeks before, still living with my parents, still getting into the rhythm, and still amazed by how early a 9:30 am class could seem even though I had been used to getting up for school that started at 7:50 for many years.
There was something different that day, though, a note of panic and surprise. “Someone crashed a plane into the World Trade Center!”
It was cold there, that late in the winter and that close to the water. I didn’t expect the first time I ever saw seagulls to be concurrent with a snowfall; I’d always associated them with warmer climates and those beaches that I still had not ever visited. Yet there they were, wheeling through the air in their presumably inexorable search for food, occasionally blowing out of existence when the wind gusted and threw a blast of snow across the scene.
I was huddled in the tunnel under the pedestrian bridge in the park at East End Avenue. It was the only place I could go to get away from my house, not the most wonderful place in the world at the time.
Sitting behind the passenger’s seat of the car on that hot day, displaced by the only person who trumped me in the best friend rule, and who I would have gladly given up shotgun for a hundred times out of a hundred anyway, I should’ve already known there was nothing there.
I put this song on a mixtape for someone a long time ago.
She didn’t say yes.
Later, when I was older and smarter and better off, I put it on a mixtape for someone else. She did.
But it’s just not like me to forget the slights, is it?
Remembering nighttime rides across the Williamsburg Bridge on my way home, the wind biting just a little. Looking up at the pretty city night lights over my head and across the river and in my heart.
It seems that I, perversely, don’t have a favorite song.
I’m going to try and do the impossible in July (well, impossible for me, at least): I am going to write here every day. Via Matt Sheret (via Sarah Jaffe via Love and Zombies), I present to you:
30 Days of Music
So, it’s my turn on sfgirlbybay‘s Blog It Forward wheel. Following in the footsteps of Rhonna DESIGNS, I get to tell you today about what inspires me.