Signs of Life

Getting back to normal doesn't feel normal

It’s hard to get back to normal after the highly abnormal week or two we’ve had in Los Angeles. Indeed, I have felt guilty eating meals, going out, carrying on with regular life while the city is still burning. And yet I’ve tried. This sounds like an excuse to be cavalier, but it’s not: It’s important to return to business in order to tilt the world back on its proper axis.

Photo by Simone Busatto on Unsplash

In the fall of 2001, I was on the brink of getting married. Our wedding was planned for September 15, and on the morning of September 11, my biggest worry was whether the shoemaker would have enough time to dye my white shoes to match my ivory gown. In the shadow of disaster, ordinary concerns seem laughably petty, even though most of life is made of such little worries, little projects, little enterprises. There is no shame in it; life is only livable in small bites, rather than in drowning gulps. I was in a tizzy with all the wedding prep, not just my shoes. Among other things, we hadn’t yet gotten our marriage license. Minor detail. Because my fiancé lived in Boston and I was in New York, we could never quite coordinate the trip to City Hall for the damn thing, so we vowed to do it on Thursday before the wedding.

But that morning, as I worried over my shoes, planes hit the World Trade Center and the world seemed to stop spinning. In New York, in particular, the heaviness of shock and despair was suffocating. The idea of normal life seemed unattainable, almost hard to remember; the only reality seemed to be a sludgy sadness. We cancelled the wedding—City Hall was closed and we wouldn’t have been able to get the license, but more importantly, the idea of celebrating seemed nearly obscene. I don’t remember now how long the feeling that maybe we would never be happy again lasted, but eventually we had to set a new date for the wedding. We chose November, hoping that gave enough time for some capacity for joy to return.