The huffing and puffing over the Brooklyn Bridge bike path finally snuffs out all the negative thoughts in my head. I think there are cockroaches living in the coffee maker. I think I drank cockroach coffee this morning. The cockroaches migrated over from the next-door apartment after it was obliterated by a fire. They packed up their loungewear and tiny picnic baskets and drove their little cockroach jitneys through the wall to our place. Then they descended on the Bonavita 8 cup coffee maker. Or at least that was my thought at 6am this morning as I considered brewing a pot of coffee. I did. I drank it down. It tasted good. It had those special entomological notes unique to the German variety. I sat there in my chair and thought about bugs and fire and sudden transformation. Those cockroaches survive everything. They scramble through adversity, find new abodes, always creeping, always outliving.

I sat at the edge of one of the worst transformations of my lifetime yesterday, staring at the falling water of the World Trade Center reflecting pools. It felt like a long time ago that I visited Windows of the World for drinks with a view at the North Tower of the World Trade Center. There was always a line to get in. I remember being there with colleagues from our Spanish Harlem day program for people with developmental disabilities. Those surrounding us were dressed for a night out. We had just come from work, wearing clothes that may have been soiled with human fluids.  It felt like we were being fancy, above our pay grade. I remember sitting at a table staring out at the sparkly city, pleased to feel like we could belong to this place. It was not about that building. It was something else. I was a citizen of this configuration of islands, visible from above. And I took it for granted. 

Yesterday I sat there staring out at empty space that once held concrete and steel and a twenty-five-year version of myself that never did much out of the ordinary. The tower itself was not ordinary. Years before I moved through the many floors in an elevator standing next to my parents and neighbors. It was 1978. The towers were bigger than anything to my eyes, bigger, epic, something barely real. In the photograph of that day, I am sporting a bandage above my lip where I had punctured my cheek a few days earlier on a concrete cinder block. That year contains a few punctuated specific memories: tripping against a cinder block wall  and standing on the observation deck of the World Trade Center.  It is that general sense of things that happened and I was there and I remember the presence of my father and mother and taking it all for granted, a permanent arrangement for a lifetime. 

I am sitting there on the edge of this cold precipice thinking about time gone, the loss of people, and I arrive at the threshold of thoughts about my mother, about grief. And I know that I have squarely arrived at the worst transformation of my life. The one that really sinks deep, deeper than this hole in the ground, where the water flows continually, a vast pain that I cannot spend too much time on. This hole in the ground reminds me of it. I try to avoid too much lingering. I was once here when this building was whole. I was young and in the graces of my late mother. I think about her on that day and all the days that followed. That is too much lingering though. I get up from my bench and walk towards the subway, trying to walk away from the creeping absence. And today I think about cockroaches instead; about how they too were evaporated in fire and smoke and loss. It’s easier this way. I will drink this coffee in honor of them. You creatures of the endless.