Love Is the Higher Law
Please thank Claire for teaching me to think in human terms. Although I’m sure she’ll give some of the credit to everyone else.
Yours from far, far away,
J.
8/6/02
I’m sorry to hear about you and Aiden. That’s rough. Even if you wanted it to happen, there’s always the actuality of it happening, which is never entirely what you imagine it will be.
I think my mom and I are both ready to come home. Not only because my grandmother is completely running us ragged, but because it feels like we’ve been living a life separate from our real lives. We actually talked about it last night. She told me how much she missed my father. And it’s strange, because that actually surprised me, since I don’t miss him at all, or at least not that much. But I forget that she has made her life with him, while I’ve moved on to college. And that they probably have a whole separate life to themselves that I rarely see. It’s weird to think about. I found myself telling her how much I missed you and Claire, and how we’ve been writing practically every day. She asked if you were friends from school, and I had to try to explain to her that, no, you’re just these two people I met and kept. I’m not sure she understood, but she might have. Whatever the case, my mom now knows about you. Isn’t it time you told your mother about me? (Just kidding.)
It does bum me out that you’ll be gone by the time I get home. At the same time, we’re not too bad at mastering the time-space continuum, are we? (Sorry if I geeked you out there.)
Good night (your morning),
J.
P.S.—I’m actually not sorry at all to hear about you and Aiden. I’m actually quite selfishly happy.
P.P.S.—I’m going to hit send before I delete that last P.S.
8/21/02
Absolutely. It’s time.
Love,
J.
HERE TO YOUR THERE
Peter
6/4/02
it’s great to hear from you, jasper. i hope korea is treating you well. i’ve never been there, but you probably would have guessed that. things here are good. school is winding up. aiden was really mad because i took claire to the prom. not because i didn’t want people to know i was dating aiden—he’s very public in his affection, so i think it’s safe to say that everyone already knows. it’s just that i promised claire i would take her, back in october. you might already know this, but on our way home from a concert, she asked me to the prom, made me promise we’d decorate each other’s mortarboards for graduation, and signed me up for habitat for humanity this summer, all at once. she said she wanted to make sure this would be our year, and i wasn’t about to argue with her. aiden doesn’t get it. i bet you do.
anyway, we had a blast. i think graduation’s going to be very emotional—even more emotional than usual. because it’s been one hell of a year.
tell me more about korea,
peter
7/5/02
the 4th of july was a little bit of overkill this year, i have to say. i think i’m getting tired of flags. at first, i didn’t mind how they sprang up everywhere, because it was a sign of unity. but now it’s turned into this weird patriotism contest. and that’s not the point, is it?
claire’s worried about war. she says hi.
here to your there,
peter
8/5/02
we’re back, and soon you’ll be back (although i’ll be off to orientation by then). building a house was an incredible experience—at the risk of sounding like claire, it’s pretty incredible to do something so concrete for total strangers. at one point they had this t-shirt contest, where we were all supposed to come up with a phrase for our t-shirts, and claire won it with this simple phrase—“strangers are neighbors”—that completely summed it up.
in other news, there was this boy there, clayton, who was totally in love with claire. she denies it completely, but she blushes every time i bring it up. i hope they write.
in other, other news, of a less blushworthy variety (unless it’s a blush of embarrassment), aiden and i finally called it quits. i think he was waiting until i got back from arkansas because he didn’t want me to be bummed out while i was there, but the truth is that although that’s a sweet thing to do, i don’t actually know how bummed out i would’ve been. college was going to break us up anyway, but i’m glad it was clear that it wasn’t just college. i’m sad, but not too sad. i’m more sad that it went on for so much longer than it should have, you know?
claire and i are going to koreatown for dinner tonight. because we know you spent the last week going to arkansas restaurants, just to be with us.
we’ll raise a toast,
peter
8/20/02
okay, we’ve exchanged at least thirteen thousand emails without coming out and saying it, and since i’m leaving tomorrow, i’m going to come right out and say it.
it’s about time for our second date, isn’t it?
have a safe flight tomorrow,
peter
ANNIVERSARY
Claire
I think I’ll retrace my steps—but there’s too much that’s happened in the year. There is no way to do it. I’m in college now, still in the city, but part of a lifetime away from Mrs. Otis’s classroom. There’s no way to be standing where I’d been standing, no way to go to Mrs. Lawson’s classroom and stay with her and Sammy. We think that time is the only thing that passes, but it also changes our relationship to places.
So I narrow it down to a spot. I tell my lit professor I’m going to miss my nine a.m. class—she understands—and go down to the apartment I still think of as home and take Sammy to school. It seemed unusual at first to decide to live in the dorms, but I petitioned to be in an international dorm, and the fact that I’m surrounded by people from all over the world seems to make up for the fact that I’m still twenty blocks from home. I only moved out three weeks ago, so I don’t think Sammy’s even missing me yet.
He’s quiet as we walk from the subway to the school—aware of the anniversary, I think, but not of its full meaning. I wonder what’s going to happen when he’s older, what parts of 9/11 he’s going to remember.
After he’s safely inside his classroom, I leave the building and stand outside, in that gap on Sixth Avenue between the lower school and the upper school. As the time nears, a few more people stop and hover, regathering. I wonder about Marisol, and where she is. I wonder if some of the other people here were also here a year ago. I find I can’t remember them, I was so caught up in getting to Sammy and finding my mother.
A year ago, I wouldn’t let myself turn around, look back. Now I join everyone else in looking at the space. Silent, we look at what isn’t there. We are doing our own acts of retracing, so much more complicated than the retracing of steps. We are retracing the lines and windows that are no longer there. We are rebuilding from our memory, trying to do with our eyes open what we usually do with our eyes closed.
At 8:46, bells ring out. And I think, This is the moment I wasn’t here. This is the moment of what I didn’t see. And then, when the time comes, This was when I came out here. I stood over there. This was when.
I still cannot hear a siren without fearing the monumental. I cannot help noticing the airplanes over the city, which I never paid attention to before. Most of the time I manage to forget to be afraid. But sometimes I think, This could be it, and I move forward anyway.
It crosses my mind every day. Sometimes it will be a story I hear on the radio. Sometimes I’ll be walking and will look downtown. And other times it will be like I am seeing it out of the corner of my eye.
I feel emptier this morning. That empty space goes inside. It is not the whole story, but it is a part of it. And the rest of the story is: We love and we feel and we try and we hope.
I can’t help it—I find Sammy’s new third-grade classroom and peek in through the window. I see him at his desk, doing something with pipe cleaners. He isn’t smiling—instead he’s concentrating in that complete, unembarrassed way that kids have. I stay there for a minute or two, watching.
This has to be part of the day, too.
ANNIVERSARY
Peter
I said, “Are you sure September 11th is an appropriate day for a second date?”
And he said, “I’ll see you on Wednesday.”
But the conversation didn’t end there, as it once might have. He paused and said, “Who else would you want to spend it with?”
And he’s right. Probably Claire, but she’s in New York right now. So, yes, Jasper.
I pointed out that it wasn’t even our real anniversary—only the anniversary of the night we were supposed to go out. He laughed into the phone and told me that was great, because now he didn’t have to bring flowers. I pressed the phone to my ear, heard his breathing after the sentence was over. I waited for him to say something else, because if I wait long enough, he always does. He’s like Claire in that way. Whereas I can stay in silences for hours.
We decided that he’d come to visit me in Boston, so I’m waiting for him at South Station. I spent most of the morning—the time I wasn’t in classes—reading the papers, reading all of the takes on what 9/11 means, one year later. I still feel like I should be at home. Maybe standing outside Tower Records. Or with my family.
I haven’t seen Jasper since Claire’s party in May, but it feels like I have. When I find him in the terminal, we hug, not kiss. And before we do anything else, we call Claire, who picks up on the first ring and tells us she was hoping we’d call. She says she’s been looking at the photos of the lights, creating her own little remembrance ceremony. She wishes she were with us, and we wish she were with us, too. Not that we don’t want to be alone with each other. But today, now, we’d also love to be with her.
“So,” Jasper says once we’ve hung up, “what should we do?”
I’ve only been here a few weeks; all I know are cheap restaurants and record stores. I take him to Newbury Comics and buy him the Now It’s Overhead CD because he says he’s never heard of them. I launch into this whole history of Saddle Creek records, then cut myself off, because it’s not really something he would be interested in.
“I don’t really have sophisticated musical taste,” he tells me. “But I’d like to.”
That’s good enough for me.
Next stop is Bertucci’s for dinner. It’s a little too crowded, a little too loud. And even though the papers and newscasts have been full of it, everyday life doesn’t seem to have stopped much to remember a year ago. Not in Boston, at least. I’m worried that we’re not talking, that we haven’t had a chance to talk, and that maybe we’re going to end up much better at emailing than being with each other in person.
“This is strange,” he says, and I don’t know whether he’s talking about us or the restaurant or the day. I wait, and he goes on. “I saw Amanda on my way to class this morning—you know, the girl I tried to give blood with? I don’t think I’ve seen her in at least half a year, but today of all days, I bump into her. And she tells me she was just thinking about me—she’s been thinking about me a lot lately, because I was a part of that day for her. And I understood what she was saying, but the weird thing was that I hadn’t really thought of her at all. I think of you, and Claire, and even Mitchell and his party. It’s like, for most people, that day is about what happened on that specific day, but for me it’s become about what happened right after. It’s not what I saw, but it’s about who I shared it with. Is it like that for you?”
“The truth?” I ask.
He smiles. “Yeah, the truth.”
“The truth is that I don’t know. Because you were a part of that day for me. I was so excited that morning when I woke up, about going out with you. I mean, I was excited about the Dylan album, too, but mostly about you. I was thinking about you when I picked out what to wear, and I was thinking about you when I got on the subway, and I was probably thinking about you while I was waiting for Tower to open. And even after it all happened, I remember thinking that I had to email you, that I had to make sure you were okay, that it meant something that such a big event got in our way.”