All my wasted New Year’s

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Like every other party girl, I was always in search of the perfect New Year's Eve. Four years ago, I rang it in at a club on the Lower East Side with my then-boyfriend. Champagne rained down on our heads at midnight as we stood on a dance floor spilling over with people and vodka. I had always been searching for this feeling of belonging, this euphoria, and I had reached that beautiful point where I was slightly tipsy but not yet drunk, and I vowed to stay there this time.

Somehow, though, I managed to talk him into hitting up one more bar before we headed back to my parents’ place. And somehow, I managed to down another drink, then another, despite his hand reaching out to stop me. I remember flashes of dancing, and then stumbling home, and screaming something about the “golden-haired prince,” a waiter I just knew was flirting with me.

When I got home, I ran to the bathroom to throw up, and then came back as if nothing had happened. I did this multiple times before passing out, mascara smeared all over my face, one heel on and the other off. I was still wearing my glittery dress.

The 9/11 stories we’ve never told anyone

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 13:01:00 +0000

We were 12 years old and in our first-period class at I.S.89 when the planes hit the twin towers. It was the second day of seventh grade, and the only thing separating our school from the World Trade Center was a highway.

Parents rushed in to the cafeteria where we had been evacuated and pulled out their children amid the chaos. I knew mine would not be among them. My dad worked in Staten Island; my mom, far uptown at Rockefeller Center. I began panicking, wondering how I would get home to my elderly grandparents. Eventually I begged my neighbor and her 13-year-old son to walk me home. We left just minutes before the first tower fell.

What we witnessed as we pushed through crowds and ran for our lives has become common knowledge in the past decade, though it is still fresh in my mind. The sickening thud of bodies hitting cars, the sound of the tower crumbling, and our universe engulfed in the cloud. People screamed and sobbed and suffered heart attacks on the spot. The other kids in I.S. 89 had gotten out of the war zone, but only my neighbor and I were running into it. We wandered around desperately for hours, trying to find a way into the east side where my grandparents lived, thinking that bombs were being dropped on the surrounding buildings, that fighter jets were shooting at us. We had no idea if we would be killed in an instant, or what was going to happen next. It seemed the world was ending. But it was only the world as I knew it that ended that day.

Salon.com > Helaina Hovitz

All my wasted New Year’s

The 9/11 stories we’ve never told anyone