Posted August 15th, 2003 by Michelle

Sleep has finally left me. It’s been a blessed companion since I got home from the wedding and now it has abandoned me. I was awake when the power came on in the middle of the night, awake when my alarm sounded this morning. I lunched with my good friend Kellie yesterday, and she wisely told me that I had to embrace the pain. She said to try not to bury in in booze or anything else, but to walk in the middle of it and be present in it. Maybe that’s why I didn’t sleep.

What is wrong with me? It took my ex over five wrenching, abusive years to break my heart.

Anyway, on with my day. I’m off for my colposcopy, and I hope to bring news of a pre-cancerous cell free me. I wrote the following entry during the blackout last night…

Thursday, August 14th

The darkness on my block is so complete, so eerie and unreal that I must be out in it. I’m sitting on my front stoop with my Palm Pilot and travel keyboard, a J.W. Dundee’s HoneyBrown lager and my cat Zooey. I don’t know what time it is but it is past dusk, the light in the sky blue-black to my left, blue glow to my right. I have about fifteen candles lighting my apartment, and currently have my headlamp on my head as I write this. I need the light to write, but every minute or so I turn it off just so I can experience the dark- something so little seen in this city,

I walked from Union Square to Park Slope, Brooklyn today. At 4:08, I was just beginning a yoga class taught by my good friend B, and when the power went out, we thought we must have blown a fuse. Ha ha ha. We went on with class, sweat dripping down our backs to make our mats slick, not really thinking there was any trouble.

Just after 5, I left the yoga center, and I walked several blocks up 6th Ave before realizing there was an unusual number of people on the streets. I kept trying to reach my brother Sean on his cell phone and was annoyed to find that nothing was working. And then I got scared. Last time I was walking through New York City with all the people on the streets and no cell service, something was terribly, terribly wrong.

Thankfully I figured out that it was just a blackout. But then the rumors began about how far the blackout spread, and everyone assumed that Canada was an exaggeration. For the first time in months, I hadn’t ridden my bike in to the city, so not only was I in the dark to the true nature of the situation, I was also stranded. I headed to work, where I found three friends waiting to walk to Brooklyn. I’ll admit to partaking of both beer and tequila to take the edge off the walk, and it worked.

I don’t know exactly how many people walked the Manhattan Bridge with me tonight, nor how many strode down the middle of Bowery or stopped traffic on Flatbush. It was a really long walk, and we stopped whenever we found a sprinkler or bottled water. (I braved a trip to the Port-O-Potty at the base of the bridge; a letter to my beloved found a much more useful place in my life as toilet paper.) The only person in my family I was able to reach was my mother on her cell, and I delivered her news to the masses in front and behind me on the bridge. “BLOOMBERG SAYS THERE WILL BE POWER TONIGHT! TURN EVERYTHING OFF WHEN YOU GET HOME!!!!”

I met really nice people on the walk home, and when I finally reached my apartment, I ran up and down the stairs in the fading light to make sure everyone had candles and matches. There was no one home, so I settled on the porch to write. As I finished the above paragraph, my entire house showed up. Some of my neighbors were here to pick stuff up and leave, but about ten of us spent the last two hours on the porch. I made PB and J’s, another neighbor made pasta and we sat and talked and enjoyed what little breeze we found.

So many other things happened today, so many greater feelings and thoughts, but when you walk across the bridge with your entire neighborhood and beyond, and you still don’t have electricity (i.e. no air conditioner, fan, ice, cold water), the larger issues of basic survival become the most important.