End Credits by Patty Lin

Author:Patty Lin [Lin, Patty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zibby Books

By late August, I felt overwhelmed. Our hours were getting longer all the time, and I was always being pulled in multiple directions. My apartment was a mess, my TiVo backlogged with shows I never had time to watch. Exercise was just another chore to squeeze into a jam-packed schedule. When my friends wanted to see me, all I could manage was a rushed lunch during which I’d complain about how stressed out I was. I didn’t even think about meditating again after my aborted attempt two years before. If I didn’t have time to catch up on Survivor, I sure as fuck didn’t have time to meditate.

One morning in early September, I woke up feeling sluggish, not looking forward to tackling the day. As I stood at the stove making breakfast, I looked down at my usual pot of heart-healthy oatmeal and it hit me that there wasn’t enough joy in my life. It didn’t occur to me that this might have something to do with my job—nope, not ready to open that can of worms. Instead, I needed a quick fix that wouldn’t require me to look too closely at my life choices. I dumped my steaming gruel into the garbage, grabbed some eggs and thick-cut bacon from the fridge, and cooked myself a cholesterol fest while I sipped coffee from my favorite oversized mug. I resolved to treat myself to this indulgence every day to bring joy back into my life. As if bacon were the answer to all my problems.

On a Tuesday morning soon after that, I woke up to a news report on the radio announcing that the World Trade Center had been attacked and the Twin Towers had collapsed. The words did not compute. Groggy and disoriented, I slid out of bed and made my way into the living room, where I turned on the TV and saw the now-famous footage of the North and South Towers disintegrating in a cloud of rubble.

As I stood there, slack-jawed, the phone rang. It was our writers’ assistant, a young hipster named Aron.

“Aron, oh my God. Are you watching the news?”

Of course he was. Everyone was. Poor Aron was given the task of telling the writers that we should report to the office as usual. Too shell-shocked to register the absurdity of this, I said okay, hung up, and got ready for work—showering, getting dressed, and eating my eggs and bacon, all performed in a surreal fog between bouts of staring at the TV, my mouth agape.

Since my TiVo had recorded three hours of earlier breaking news, I could roll back and watch the whole series of events as they unfolded: the first tower erupting into flames, a plane crashing into the second tower, both skyscrapers falling to the ground, bedlam at the Pentagon, reports of a fourth hijacked plane crashing in a field in Pennsylvania.

Within an hour Aron called me again. “No work today,” he said this time. “No one’s coming in.”

A horribly inappropriate thought popped into my head: snow day.

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