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Four in the morning. I didn't sleep. I haven't slept in a very long time. The dreams are strong, vivid, of frozen people and terror. I've mostly stopped crying, except late at night in the tub with the water running so the neighbors don't hear. The neighbor whose bedroom backs up to mine doesn't meet my eyes anymore.
Grieve not...
In the shower, I wondered idly if Tommy would be around when I went home, and then I remembered.
Tommy's dead. We had a funeral. It was wonderful and awful. So many people. His 29-years-old pregnant wife. His two-years-old daughter. She looks just like him, a miniature smiling Tommy in a black velvet party dress.
Nor speak of me with tears...
What I remember: Parking in front of the house I grew up in, unable to get anywhere close to the stone church. Walking with a bunch of my guy friends and their wives and looking up to see Greg, silent, tears running down his face. Grabbing his hand and squeezing it tight and stumbling on the rough hewn steps.
Tommy's family. Wide, expansive, Irish, Catholic, strong. Kennedy grins. His brothers. Twice at his memorial I spotted one or the other of Tommy's brothers, and would think "Oh, there's Tommy." And then seize up when I realized.
But laugh and talk of me as though I were beside you.
I approached one of them outside the hotel, where he was surrounded by his friends, smoking a cigarette and nursing a scotch. He looked up, smiled. Said that Tommy was looking down on us, listening to the Allman Brothers on an 8-track and snaking at a tailgate party in heaven.
Tommy. When I think about him now, I think about a freezing cold night in the middle of winter, laying on a deserted football field with a bottle of scotch and all of our problems.
I think about the tie-dyed t-shirts he'd wear under his flannels. About our kindergarten class picture where he had no front teeth and I was pretending to be a rabbit. Tommy.
I loved you so...
I saw the notices tacked up at the church for the others. Too many to count. Newsday said that entire blocks of people from my hometown are missing. What happens, in a town like mine, is that maybe you got a job trading bonds where your dad worked. And maybe he got jobs for a few of your friends, too. C@ntor Fitzger@ld. EuroTr@ders. S@ndler O'Neill. A0n.
And maybe all of you will die together when a madman decides he's had just about enough of America. Enough of Tommy and all of us who died with him, this perfect cross-section of America. The rich, the middle class, the working class, the poor, the undocumented. Everyone from CEOs to the desperately unlucky delivery boy from a neighborhood deli. Cutting a wide swath through our demographics, a perfect slice of my city.
After, I went to Molly's Pub to drink myself stuporous, Claire Faye in tow. A bunch of Tommy's college friends had beat us to the bar. Claire Faye was a magnet for their grief, she having dated Tommy in college. A burly Irishman with bloodshot eyes cornered her in the alcove where Robin used to steal me away for kisses and wept into her hair, his great shoulders heaving.
I hope it was fast. I hope he didn't suffer. His wife called and spoke to him right after the airplane hit the first building. I don't want to think about it too much, don't want to examine the possibilities. Don't want to think about all of the people we lost. All those daddies.
'Twas heaven here with you.