Coming Home
Annie young
January 1, 2003
I picked my cousin up from the Newark airport on Monday night. She'd never been to New York before. As we drove up the turnpike, I told her, "That's the famous New York skyline." Twenty-four hours later, as we made our way into Jersey City, trying to get home, it looked as though our whole city had vanished.
Like many New Yorkers, I'm estranged from another city. Six years ago I moved here with no idea what I wanted to do or even if I could be brave enough to stay. My third day in New York I heard a car backfire, and immediately ran back to the safety of my room and didn't come out for the rest of the day.
My mother's first words to me on Tuesday were, "I want you to come home." By home, she means Baltimore. Place of my birth. She wants to give me safety, comfort, rest. But I am home. If my parents lived on Long Island, or in Connecticut or New Jersey, I would know how to go home. Instead, I insist to her that I can't leave, I won't leave—why, I don't know, but I have to stay.
I've never been unable to go home. I've navigated Reykjavik by foot, England by rail, and most of the Northeast by car. I've arranged travel for movie stars from their homes in Los Angeles to homes in London to homes in Florida. But on Tuesday, I couldn't go home.
Two weeks ago I started work on a film with offices in Bayonne, New Jersey, just across the river from Manhattan. Driving to work in my company car every morning for those two weeks and two days, I marveled at the brilliant view of the Manhattan skyline. Tuesday, 11 September, was a clear day, and we saw it all. When I try to write down what I saw, it feels false and wrong and like it happened to somebody else. I know that I saw flames.
We scrambled to find hotel rooms to stay the night. ...
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