Nic Narrates

Sometimes I try to remember what I was like before. I know a lot of people try to remember what life was like before, so maybe it means I’m selfish now to wonder more specifically what I was like. But I do sometimes.

I wonder whether I was any different at all, if what happened that day changed me or if it was simply the passing of time. When I try to remember what I was doing and thinking and feeling, I can’t. I have no recollection of September 10. I have only speculation. Is it that nothing before really mattered? Or that it was just another day, like so many before? Everyone remembers where they were on 9-11, but what about 9-10?

I was a senior in college then, living in an apartment with my two roommates who I’d met freshman year in the dorms. They both went to high school together, though they weren’t friends before. But then, in college, the three of us had a lot of fun together going to house parties, to the food court for dinners of cereal, and taking our lectures on film and biology. By the start of that last fall semester though, our fun was pretty much used up.

I must not have been on speaking terms with them because I recall feeling surprised when I woke up and Kate was at my bedroom door. She was speaking to me, I can’t remember why she hadn’t been in the first place, and told me a plane hit a building in New York and it was all on Good Morning America. She’d always been kind of a ditz, so I just assumed she misheard the news and wandered into the living room to make sense of it for her. And that was it; that was the moment when I first knew.

I wonder if it is an overstatement to say that I didn’t merely wake up that morning. My eyes had never been so open. Life continued to swirl around me–the making of coffee, the laying down of silent treatments, the other roommate, Allie, returning home from work, classes being held and then cancelled, our mothers calling, lunch time arriving and passing–while I sat witnessing it come to an end for so many as though a light switch had been thrown. Whoosh!

After the towers fell, Allie yelled at me for mislabeling a food bin. After the towers fell, it no longer seemed normal or okay for her to do so. I wondered, “who is this person who yells about something so insignificant?” In stunned disbelief, I remember pointing at the TV as she threatened and swore.

I’d like to say the three of us were able to put aside our differences and get through the day, but I don’t think we did. The same tense disquiet that must have been present the day before when I sat taking notes in my classes, went to my internship, and went to bed that night, would continue. And at our annual Halloween costume kegger, I finally confronted them and burned every last bridge. By December I moved out, leaving them with a subleasing stranger for a roommate. I never spoke to them again.

Thrown into relief by the reality of what was happening outside of our apartment, our college town, our tiny little world; the pettiness and ignorance of those girls was astounding. It was an irreversible realization for me.

So maybe it wasn’t a single day’s events six years ago that changed me, or simply how time has passed since. On closer reflection, perhaps it is in the absence of knowing who either of those girls have become as women that I better got to know myself instead.

Filed under: cohabitation, crossroads, work in progress by Nic