Living in New York City, as we know, is hardly a promise of consistent safety or comfort. The city is known for the high crime rate from the 1970s, and though violent crimes have declined since then the stereotype of New York being a hotbed of violence prevails.
On September 18th, not long after moving into Chelsea myself, I heard the news of the bombings in the area at my place of work. I came back from break and my coworker asked me, “don’t you live in Chelsea? A bomb just went off there.”
I asked where in Chelsea it had happened, but he replied that he didn’t know. Immediately, all sense of normalcy shattered before me. I asked if I could call my mother, not even sure what I needed to say to her but knowing I needed to hear her voice. He told me to wait until he’d gotten permission from our boss for first, and left me to wait anxiously by the radio for news of where exactly the bomb had gone off.
Customers came in and I helped them in my regular way, fingers trembling and using all of my brain power to block out the images of my dorm room window blown to dust, my books reduced to ash, and my bed engulfed in dancing orange flames.
When at last I was cleared to step out, I called my mother. Followed by contacting her, I called my good friend who lived in the same dorm building as I did, and at last texted my girlfriend, though I knew she would not be able to respond for quite some time given she was at work at the time.
The rest of my work shift passed in a noiseless blur. I took a cab home, assuming the trains that passed through Chelsea would be shut down and too shaken to look up anything related to the incident. For the first time the home that I lived in was not safe. No matter where I went, a sensation of being hunted followed me. The one place I expected to return to for a sense of safety was no longer safe, and I had no choice but to stay where I was.
Days later on September 20th, I was again at work, and once more the threat of violence interrupted my peaceful evening. When I arrived for my shift I saw that the street nearby had been blocked off by the police. It made me anxious to again see the threat of violence so close to me, but not enough to send me into a panic yet. I assumed whatever they were doing so close to us would die down quickly enough.
That, however, was not the case. Around eight o’clock that night police tape started to come out, and an officer approached me and told me they were closing off the street and that we had to close up. I called my boss out, and moments later she rushed me out of the building. There we closed up the store as quickly as we could, pausing only to dump the cash register into the safe and set the alarm. We surely left a tremendous amount of work for the openers that would arrive the next day, but we did not have the time to worry about them.
The anxiety I had felt just days ago and had managed to repress came slamming back to me at full force. As the two of us scrambled out of the building, I felt as if I were being shadowed by the threat of violence. As I sped away to my home once again in a cab I felt the heat of fire on my coattail, and a sense of déjà vu crept into my consciousness. Was this going to become a routine?
I fled from one threatened bomb site to my “safe place” back in my dorm in Chelsea. There are three areas of town where I spend 100% of my time: SOHO, where I work, Chelsea, where I live, and the Village, where I attend school. I’m almost always in one of those three places in the city, and now two out of those three places had been threatened.
I was surprised to see everything continue as normal even while it was actively happening. Even as I fled from the SOHO bomb threat, just severa blocks away were tourists in trendy outdoor seated restaurants, laughing and eating as if nothing was wrong. The city continued on and I only caught traces of fear from a handful of fellow New Yorkers I’d talked to. Days after the bombing in Chelsea, I saw a tweet laughingly stating that New Yorkers feared bed bugs more than bombings, and to that I couldn’t help but feel insulted.
While I can’t help but be proud of the resilience of my city of residence, I have to also wonder if any of these people saying New Yorkers weren’t shaken by the incidents were actually New Yorkers themselves, or if they were, did they live so close to the area that had been threatened? Did they already live with chronic anxiety like I did? And if the answer was no for any of these, what makes them think it’s okay to generalize the feelings of such a densely populated city? While I know you can’t live your life in fear, it also bears mentioning that all of this just happened. People are scared, and are going to be for quite a while until this settles down. Let them be scared. New York may be tough, but it’s not invincible.
