12/19/01: EVERY GREAT ENDING HAS IN IT A NEW BEGINNING

DAY 100 Since the Attack.  The fires at Ground Zero are now officially, completely out!  This is great news for the air quality down here and also must be a tremendous morale booster for all of the people working so hard to clean up the Pile.

The past two weeks or so I have been isolating, avoiding, being a hermit.  I have been seeing people, but I haven’t been answering the phone or opening my mail.  I have been trying to sort out my next move.  What should I do?  Where should I go from here?  Life is short, what do I really want to do?

I have decided, I am moving back to Los Angeles.  I will look for a job there and focus on becoming a professional screenwriter.   I will be glad to be around family and old friends, happy not see destruction every day and relieved not to worry anymore that my health is in jeopardy at every breath.

I am also relieved to have made a decision about my next move.  It’s a bittersweet move, however.  I am sad about leaving the great friends I have made here.  I feel a deep melancholy at leaving this City, perhaps the Greatest City on Earth.  I will miss my beautiful apartment on the Hudson River.  Who knows when I will ever again have such a great view in a place that I love so much?

I am going to Los Angeles on Friday, December 21, for the holidays.  I will look at used cars and apartments while I’m there.  I want to live in Los Feliz or somewhere actually in the City of Los Angeles.  Though I have always said I’m from LA, I have never technically lived in Los Angeles, but in Pasadena, the Valley, a short stint in Malibu, etc.  I have done a lot of reading recently on Los Angeles history, which has reminded me how connected I feel to LA.  I will move in February.

I wish I had inspiring words of wisdom with which to end this journal.  As so many of us, I suspect that in many respects I am a different person than I was when the day started on September 11.  What a difference an hour makes.

But I wish I could pinpoint how I am different.  Which new feelings, responses and perspectives are ingrained in me forever and which will fade in time.  I wish that the purpose and lessons of the events over the past three months were clear to me so that I could share them directly with the world.  As corny as it sounds, I truly would like to teach the world to sing.  Unfortunately, I still don’t know how to myself.

Catch you on the flip side.

Mary Bourke

Battery Park City

New York, New York

December 19, 2001