Alone

“There’s a certain bravado required for living alone in New York City when you’re young.”

I’m about to head on my annual 9/11 pilgrimage to a Greek Orthodox church. I was living in Astoria on 9/11, and the big Greek Orthodox church there had its doors wide open to welcome the neighborhood. I am still grateful for the silent community I found there, sitting in the pews. Now every year I try to light a couple candles and donate a few bucks at whatever Greek Orthodox church is handy.

I needed the community that morning. I lived alone in a tiny one bedroom. As the news came in via NY 1 and email alerts, and the terror took hold, I had to be around other scared people.

That worked during the day. I had pizza with a local friend, grabbed drinks with another local friend who’d been at Ground Zero and arrived home to Astoria with her hair caked in Twin Tower dust.

That night, I returned to my empty apartment. I don’t know why my friends and I didn’t camp out with each other that night. There’s a certain bravado required for living alone in New York City when you’re young. You’re supposed to love it. You strive for the day when you don’t live with roommates.

Which is not to say I wished I was living with any of my previous roommates on that day. It would have made a terrible day even more stressful.

Still, lying alone in bed that night was awful. It continued to be awful. Each night, the space between consciousness and dreaming would be filled with visions of the different ways people had suffered in the attacks. One night the people on the planes, another night the people looking out the windows of their office seeing the planes approaching, and so on.

I wished desperately for someone who could hold me, someone I could hold. I would will myself to sleep each night, then go through it again the next night.

I have never really liked sleeping alone, though I’ve done it most of my life. As a kid, I would sometimes get really sad and lonely in the middle of the night and go into my little brother’s room to hug him while he slept. When I had nightmares, of course, I would call for my Mom, who would stumble in to comfort me, then urge me to go back to sleep before returning to her room. I always wished she would stay, but that was not allowed by the parenting experts at the time. Or something like that.

I loved having someone to sleep next to when I got married, but that stopped after a while. He would fall asleep on the couch every night.

My kid slept next to me for a few years. It started when we lived in the crappy apartment over the restaurant. Her room would get way too hot in the wintertime, and my room would get way too cold. I’d go in to check on her and find her sweating through her pajamas, so I’d scoop her up and bring her into my bed as a hot water bottle.

Her room was scary anyway. Her one window opened onto a fire escape and had no bars. There was an actual convicted violent felon living behind us, and while he was on house arrest, his friends consulting with him over the fence weren’t.

She had no bedroom door, just an empty frame that faced the kitchen, just a few feet from the stove that had been incorrectly hooked up to the gas pipe when we first moved in. I was terrified of her being trapped in there during a fire

With my husband on the couch every night anyway, I felt better having her in with me. She’d kick me awake at 4AM and occasionally pee next to me, but it was worth it.

When my marriage ended, we moved in with my Mom and shared a little mattress on the floor of her guest room for two years.

In the apartment after that, Rosie had her own room, but would always crawl in with me eventually.

At our next apartment, she suddenly decided she was done. She slept in her own room the first night and has done it every night since. I had gotten tired of the 4AM kicks, but the change was so abrupt it threw me off. I wasn’t ready!

Now I mostly sleep alone again. I can find community on my phone when I’m panicking. Sometimes I pop in to Rosie’s room and hug her while she’s sleeping.

I didn’t imagine on the day of the attacks that twenty-two years later my strongest emotional memories would be of lying alone in bed terrified. The smoke, the ruins, men with machine guns in the subway stations now almost feel like historical moments I read about. Lonely, sleepless terror still feels real to me.