Sometimes, all we should do is stop and listen. Listen to the bustling and the rustling around us, soak up all that noise, interpret those noises, and feel them. They are no longer just noises or faces of strangers, but emotions and feelings expressed in their physical form.
Yesterday was 9/11. I woke up, had breakfast, went to class, cut my hair, strolled around in Chelsea, had dinner, went to a club meeting, then came back home and stayed. Let me expand.
After contemplating whether or not to go to my Chem lecture this morning, I went to my second class instead at 11AM. Ate lunch with Ronda at Kimmel’s dining hall, then took the blue line to Penn Station to get my hair cut.
To summarize the experience, it was terrible. The stylist ignored me half of the time, and it was only made worse because she looked perfectly packaged. I mean, sure she could’ve been a nice and warm individual, but my impression was just a cold chauvinistic/materialistic barbie. Ok that was a little harsh, but I have to live with her work on my head for the next three weeks. I could’ve totally gotten the same hair cut if I went to a fucking barber for half the price, but I guess Caucasians just aren’t so good with Asian hair. Whichever the case, I’m going to Flushing to get my hair cuts in the future.
Instead of taking the train, I walked from Penn station back to third north. Chelsea isn’t a place to be missed (except, well, straight girls), as I strolled down 8th avenue, the whole place oozes what I felt like a sense of belonging. Instead of the narrow and secretive like Christopher street, the area of Chelsea is brutally open to the world. Yes, I will return to this place in the near future. (also found two nice restaurants when I started to walk east, maybe I’ll come to these places when I go on a date… whenever that would be)
On my way back to third north later that evening after the club meeting, I had a strong desire to observe strangers, and so I did. Outside Weinstein people were pointing towards the direction of Ground Zero. Two beams of light shot into the night sky where the Twin Towers once stood. I didn’t go to the site today, but it’s devastating how close, and yet so far away, 9/11 is. There is a lamp post at the intersection of Astor place and 4th avenue (I read this in one of my WTE* stories), decorated with beautiful mosaics by a man whose name I can’t recall. There are several of these lamp post scattered in the neighborhood, and they are there as a remembrance of the people that were lost in the tragedy.
People passing by hurried on their way. They laugh, they smile, and they chat. The monument, however, penetrated through the barrier of time, connecting the past and the present. Will we be remembered when we die? Or will our presence slip into the shadow, and eventually travel down the sewer into another world unknown? Everything around me seemed so alive that night as I continued walking last night, but what happens when it comes to a point in the future and our present becomes a forgotten past? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.
