Nine Eleven, the Airiness

I have a lot of mixed emotions about that date. September eleventh.

A lot of half resolved, unresolved, emotions. But who doesn't?

I suppose it is a little different for me. Different for everyone.

I guess I don't understand. The price of globalization maybe? The cost of it is having to shake hands with bad people to get good things? How good are the good things we get from rubbing up with bad people? I think that's something I don't understand. Can't fully grasp.

I'm sort of, well definitely filled with some hatred. Some amount. Okay, a lot of. If everyone here basically acknowledges that the American way of life is worth preserving then let's not do it half way. Lets train two million soldiers and go destroy them. I suppose that would work in a vacuum where the only people that existed were us and them. But not the case.

That angers me. The morass of it all. The round about way of. The global village. The ridiculous diplomacy of it.

I'm angry, still. Angry that I was rejected from enlistment despite scoring perfect marks on everything except my mental history. I wanted to enlist because I want to go kill them. I want, in a way similar to what, in some ways, creates terrorism, to be able to voice and exercise the power of the will to be where that power has been removed from me and my voice cut away. Not just them. Everyone who has denied me. Everyone who has made me suffer toward their own advancements and gains. Somebody has to pay. I'm no patriot. Half the days I wake up I wish I could leave this country. The fact that I am trapped here, and was even denied release on the grounds that I kill her enemies saddens me. What do I have to do?

I'm still upset. Upset that telling my father I was going to enlist got nothing but the response "that's not in line with the family standard of excellence". What standard of excellence? Half the family tree is or was in and out of jail. The other half, a bunch of alcoholics and babies having babies. The other half a group of two faced liars and double life livers. And he voted to reelect Bush. Voted against Obama. And calls me a failure for wanting to be somebody. For wanting to be more than the sum of his life and failings. For wanting to be a part of the wars he himself voted to support. How wrong headed can a man be? How fucking screwed up. Death can't come soon enough for him.

It's also the anniversary of the start of a relationship with the last woman I will love that intensely (since embracing who I am as a homosexual). We're still friends. The best five years of my life to date. Chased by the worst two years and still counting (but ticking back to the brighter side) since it unraveled under the undeniable pressures of what was in the face of what could be. The force of fact over riding fiction. If only a handful of things aligned a different way, I might be telling you about graduate school and engagement and house warmings instead. She was the last visitor to the surface of my world. She still sends postcards now and then. I want to tell her I still love her, but I think she knows. The thing that's difficult, well most difficult, is that I can't do anything more than that. I guess that's okay.

A lot of anger. At being abandoned over and over again by my parents. Believing I could trust them. Being convinced I could count on them. Convincing myself. Only to be abandoned once more. Abandoned on 9/11 when planes were falling. Abandoned to let the bottom fall out of my academic career. Abandoned at bus stops with people getting shot by a mass murderer in school parking lots right around the way. That's not what family is supposed to be. Beaten, abandoned, beaten, abandoned, over and over and over.

I'm not numb to nine eleven. Kill them all. I'm saddened and confused. At a loss and at times slightly warmed.

I am loved somewhere.

I'm at times directionless. What am I supposed to do now? What am I supposed to do without you? without a way to make them answer for what they did to me? without a way to put the enemies of an entire nation in the dirt? What am I supposed to tell you when I know that door is closed? Without a real place in a country that feels like it pushes me to its edges at every new juncture?

Nine eleven has me reflect on those things. Reflect on possible answers. And trying to forget. Dull the sharpness.

Somewhere in there, I'm okay.

And I'm just like you, a little and sometimes a lot lost, for a day.