Campfire
I don’t remember arriving home that evening. I do remember passing bars crowded with people in suits, windows open and doors, cocktails, beers, wondering aloud, faces wide, heads shaking, news glowing like a campfire. Where else to go?
Vigil
The next day nobody knows whether or not to go to school. Late morning, someone posts its closure on the website. It is inside the Lower Manhattan cutoff. We stay away for the week. I find an apartment in Jersey City. During the week, missing persons flyers paper the city. Union Square itself becomes a shrine, candles and vigils, posters and chalk, visitors paying respects to the lost, to their shock, to their city, through the night. I find myself walking there when I have no where else to go, leaning into the low park wall, feeling the cool spatter of rain. Watching, listening, waiting for an answer in the presence of all these people. A channel change. A tide.
Here now
When class resumes, we sit in a circle like zombies, wondering the substance of an art degree in the wake of our city’s event. The loose, watery practice of actors and writers pretending to be something we’re not. What are we doing here, now? Our teacher summons the fires of hell and heaven and future and past, imploring us to understand that the voices of artists are the voices our culture needs most, as it finds its way through this rebirth. That imagination is not pretense, that creativity is deepest truth.
Breeze
I refuse to go to Ground Zero or get close. One night, I share a seat on the PATH train to Jersey with a man whose boots and jeans are covered in thick dust. It is the end of the day. While everyone is tired and quiet, his body seems held up by only his skeleton, the rest of him slumped into the seat, swaying. No one speaks.
The smell of jet fuel and demolition still wafts through the air on a breeze.
Possessed
One day we sit in a clown workshop. The teacher tells 40 of us, sitting on the floor in a circle, facing outward, to each put on the smallest mask, the clown nose. There is ritual to putting on a mask. You let it hover in front of your face, and as you set it to rest there, you breathe into the mask, thereby breathing life into it. It comes to life, and from you comes its character. It’s a possession. You watch a crowd of people in masks and you forget there are people you know underneath them. They screech and howl and strut. They laugh and stutter. And barely do you notice the person delivering the character.
On clown day, the teacher counts to three and has us all turn at once to face into the circle. We are quiet. There is Nichol and Rhea and Collette. In red clown noses. Rich and Mary and Doug and Kristen and Terry, a room full of people in a circle sitting on the floor, sun light settling in late afternoon corners. No one speaks.
I lose it.
Crack
I start to giggle. I mean, a room full of people, in silence, with straight faces, and clown noses. Everyone’s clown face swings to look at me, and I in mine am laughing. I can’t stop laughing. My voice gets high, people smile, tears come to my eyes, I am laughing so hard now I double over. When I sit up everyone is still looking and me and I laugh harder, I break with laughter, double over again, and as I am bent, feel a wave rush up from my gut. A catch a sob in my throat and press it back, confused.
Quieted, I take a breath, look up, see the red noses, and lose it into guffaws. Again I double over. Again I am possessed by pain. Again I push it back. Stop. Catch breath. Rise to look at peers. Let the fear of maniacal sobbing quell the outburst.
When it is over, I sit in the circle. I feel alone. I remember the swell in my throat, my heart, my chest, like I am going to crack, and I wish I could let myself. Break in the moment. Be taken by clowns.
(You can read all of the Memory to Light stories in order on the side bar -->)
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Thanks for reading Day 21 of “Memory to Light: 31 Days of Stories, August 11 – September 11, 2011.” It is an exercise in writing about loss, for the purpose of letting grief wake, live, and pass through the system. Grief is transformation. Story is transformation. Our world could use a some wakeful transformation right now. Take a peek at the introductory post for the full story of what we’re up to.
Join me
Consider this project an online story circle. Read a story that moves you. Write your own on your blog. Link it to the comments below, so we can read your piece. If you don’t have a blog, write your story in the comments.
Let your memories live. Let small corners of your grief breathe. Let your loss be swept into the collective experience of people sharing, witnessing, and letting be.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Pema I have been reading silently-crying, laughing and sometimes just rocking back and forth. Your clown moment spoke to me today. It can be hard to give myself permission to feel my feelings fully-the painful ones and even the joyful ones. Too often it is, “oh I feel…” and I move on. What I also know is that laughter is a doorway in. I know so well the laughter that is uncontrollable, that catches, that turns into something else-maybe truer in the moment. I have learned to let go of the shame of it. I have learned to embrace it. Thank you.
This one could crack open the world, Pema. I’ve linked it to my FB, tweeted about it, and linked it to my blog. Also, today I’ve written about where I was on that day. http://dehelensbits.blogspot.com/