In this next passage, I'm driving not toward anywhere or anyone but away from all that my life had become.
When the planes hit the twin towers in 2001, ten years had passed since I graduated from high school. I was as insecure and undefined as I was in my teenage years, though I did a better job of hiding it at age 28. My brother had been smoking a lot of pot, and I found his mood swings intolerable. My older sister and I hadn’t really been close since our childhood. We were cordial to each other at family gatherings, but we rarely ever called to check in. My younger sister was going through a divorce after spending three years living off the land with no electricity and no running water. We had nothing in common except our shared family history—but that wasn’t enough to bridge the gaps that had emerged.
I tried to seek comfort from my friends, but I realized that my life with them made me more uneasy. Many of them lived in the city and went out for dinner or drinks frequently. They could afford to. I worked from paycheck to paycheck, but I didn’t want anyone to know how strapped I was for money. I had been playing make believe with my friend’s lives, pretending that I could keep up with them, and I felt shallow and insignificant, like I was wasting my life away pretending to be someone I was not. I saw myself as a misfit among my group of closest confidants. In every realm of my life, I did not fit in.
Our 10 year reunion was scheduled for the weekend after the towers were destroyed. The event was cancelled the event., yet I longed for the comfort of nostalgia to ease my worries. I found great solace from my few remaining high school friends, and I wanted to be around them all the time. Fortunately, one was my roommate, and the other was our friend Steve, who loved coming into the city to hang out. My roommate, Julie and I decided that we would host a pseudo reunion at our apartment, and many of our classmates appreciated the chance to celebrate, to recall a time when life was far less chaotic and scary. The irony is that high school was chaotic and scary, but we all wanted to regain that bliss of youthful ignorance, even if only for a night.
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After the 9/11 attacks, I wanted to seek out my family, although it seemed like we had nothing except our family history of bickering in common. The only way back, though, was to try to understand how I had grown so far away from them. In order to love them, I did what was most comforting to me: I took up running. I spent months running through the cold of Boston’s snowy winter training for a marathon. The road was my therapist, and the training gave me a purpose, a goal. Something to accomplish.
The following March, I broke up with my boyfriend James. That same day, I pulled my hamstring. It was only two weeks before the 2002 Boston Marathon. The emotional, not the physical pain, was more formidable. I had only endured a break-up and a pulled hamstring, though my life felt so much more disappointing than that. My name, my census details, and everything that made me a common statistic were facts that I could recite, record on a form, but who was I? I’m not sure if it was the tragic circumstances of the world or my own maturation, but I suddenly felt a longing to figure it all out.
The school year progressed, and I thought a lot about the question, “Why did they attack us?” I spent a lot of time in school and at home searching for an answer, and in my search I started to find the courage to examine my own character, to confront the very things that I did not like about myself so that I could change for the better. What I had wanted for several years was to find a rich husband, someone like my friend Abby’s husband who showered her with material possessions. Suddenly money didn’t seem to matter so much. I didn’t want to be rich, I just wanted to be at peace.
Though I could no longer run because of my injury, I still longed for the solitude of the road. At the end of the school year I gave myself the summer to go wherever I could. The road seemed the only place that offered any freedom, so I drove as far away as the summer weeks would take me. In my little white Volkswagen Cabrio, alone with my thoughts from Boston to California and back, I talked into a tape recorder, and tried to find the courage to let go of my anger. With no particular destination in mind, I set out alone—not toward anywhere or anyone but away from all that my life had become.