“This is happening to me,” I numbly repeated, perched on the edge of a wrought-iron street tree planter on a windy April afternoon in 2019, as a six-alarm fire tore through my Brooklyn apartment building. My world ruptured. The future in New York I had assumed was secure with the very solid fact of home ownership became a boil of black smoke rising into a severe blue sky. 

“Eleanor lost all her photographs,” my friend Lauren wrote in a matter-of-fact email to the network of friends I’d slowly grown over the past two decades. She invited them to send any double prints they might have saved in various boxes and drawers from the time before digital cameras. 

When the envelope with Michelle’s return address on it arrived at my new rental apartment, it was thick and brittle in the way only photos can be. My mind was hazy with grief. Memories faded in and out, untethered. Michelle had become more like an avatar on social media accounts than the close friend she once was, but when I opened the envelope, I was transported. Unlike the photos I had diligently saved and feared lost, I had never seen these before. 

As I sorted through the short stack, I was astonished that a piece of myself had made its way back to me after twenty years. Amidst the rubble of my adult life, a faraway summer at the turn of the last century came rushing back.

Here was Michelle adorned with her babydoll dress, Doc Martens and dyed matte black hair playing an acoustic guitar to an audience of spiked denim vest-wearing punks. Here was me with my band, clutching my turquoise Fender with sincere determination, the same one I had just wrested out of my ruined apartment, as I wore a matching blue and white cheerleader skirt, and screeched sincerely into a microphone. And there was punk beach.

Grungy white kids with skinny limbs bathed in a misty golden light pitching towards each other as we made our way down the low-tide beach. We were barefooted and perched on the edge of the continent at the end of a millennium, fumbling out of adolescence and towards adulthood. The sea air and faded blue sky felt like it was holding its breath, like the end of summer itself. 

It was August 1999 in Maine and it felt like summer had already unspooled. I didn’t know where to take my new friends. Apart, we would talk all night on AOL instant messenger, becoming increasingly bleary-eyed as we typed what would have been whispered secrets about our lives into blue light screens about all the things we would tell each other if we were together: thwarted crushes, fights with our parents, the pointless boredom of high school, our favorite bands. But now that they were actually in front of me, I wasn’t sure how to fill up the time. 

I’d met Rachel, her older sister Michelle, and her bandmate Emily through trading zines, our lives captured in blurry stolen photocopies, and cassette tapes of our bands recorded on someone’s borrowed four track recorder. I’d found the website for my now-friends’ cassette label and ordered everything I could, folding cash into an envelope, sending it off, and hoping for the best. I was delighted when a package arrived in return. Listening to their distorted guitars and warbling voices showed me that it was possible to capture the anger that hummed through my body and inflamed my mind using whatever I had, even if it was just a borrowed acoustic guitar, cassette deck, and a microphone. 

During junior year at high school I was socially adrift, surrounded by soccer jocks and leggy varsity lacrosse girls. In contrast, Rachel and Emily went to an alternative school in faraway Ithaca, New York, where they talked freely of activism, and, as far as I knew, there were no organized sports. Michelle was already in college in New York City at a small, radical liberal arts school I dreamed of attending. Finding them, and the loose scene they were a part of, was like a beacon from a faraway lighthouse and I wanted to pull myself towards their distant shores. 

As I became more immersed in the punk scene, practicing guitar incessantly every night and amassing a collection of mixed tapes from penpals, I started to meet other teenagers in Maine. Even if they didn’t share my exact tastes, they were also searching for some semblance of subculture and a place to belong. My weekends filled with seeing their bands and practicing with my own, often driving two hours each way on icy back roads for a show of adolescent Ska bands and an amateur drum and bass DJ. While I’d begun to feel more at home, I only knew two other girls in bands, both singers. Even as my small community grew, I felt increasingly impatient to leave. The homegrown punk bands were mostly earnest and smelly teenage boys, adorned with Free Mumia patches and Crass t-shirts, who talked about anarchy and the problem of animal exploitation with heartfelt enthusiasm. I craved something different: bands with girls in them, and a sound more complex than a “one, two, three, four” followed by guttural yelling.

Rachel, Emily, and Michelle had organized shows in their town, gone on tour with their band, and even played in New York City. I was entranced by stories of small, dark clubs, and late nights in twenty-four hour diners. The center of these stories was the Lower East Side, filled with squats and the artists and activists who lived there, the whole place humming with possibility. I was impatient to be part of this world. I imagined myself sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor of a bedroom in a brick walk-up building, the room festooned with twinkling white Christmas lights and a faded red Moroccan rug, typing on a typewriter, editing a piece for an underground literary magazine. Instead, here I was, stuck randomly in the northeastern corner of the country, the end of the line, where out-of-town bands rarely ventured and a monthly poetry slam in the basement of a local coffee shop seemed to be the extent of cutting-edge literary culture. 

I tried to come up with a solution to rectify my isolation. Maybe, I thought, if I could just show people in Maine there were rock bands with girls in them, then girls who played rock music and understood the oppression of the patriarchy might magically appear, as if they had been waiting for a sign. I invited my friends to play a show in Portland, taking the risk to bring my imagined reality into my actual one.

The show would be the summer’s climax. I spent months arranging it, making long distance phone calls to punk houses across the northeast, spending hours on email on my parents’ clunky Macintosh computer, and walking around the sleepy streets of Portland, stapling flyers to telephone poles. Wanting to impress my friends, I honed the lineup, and sheepishly included my own band, as it would be our last show. At the last minute I tacked on a traveling political punk band, who were on tour to spread the word about the horrors of animal testing. Their music tended to blend together under distorted, bleating guitars and growling male vocals that I wanted to avoid, but it was rare that a punk band of any stature bothered to come to Maine. 

In the end, I crammed seven bands and a spoken word artist into five hours at a rented grange hall on the outskirts of town. I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew that was part of the do-it-yourself, punk spirit that my friends embodied and I wanted to, too. As I collected donations at the door, scrounged for extension cords, and enforced set times, I flushed with pride. The kids whose bands I’d diligently gone to see in barns and basements all over Maine came out, the dirt parking lot filled with their fading used cars. 

I hoped the show would raise my esteem in my friends’ eyes. Michelle managed to hold the place rapt with her acoustic punk songs, which I had first gotten to hear on so many cassette tapes she recorded herself. The spoken word artist performed a poem about being the only girl skateboarder in her crew and I felt a flash of recognition. While the punks had filled the main floor with spikes and back patches sewn on with dingy dental floss, the gray-haired lady who minded the place sold snacks and brewed coffee in the basement while she waited for our roaring noise to be done. The floor, accustomed to square dances and bingo nights, shook as the punks stomped around in a circle pit, and I tried my best to reassure the caretaker that we would, in fact, be out by eleven. 

My band played second-to-last. We’d hardly been a band at all, just an idea that started in Erek’s basement the summer before. We were noisy, disjointed, and yell-y, and now we’d cleaved apart. Each of us venerated a completely different style of music, with Sonic Youth being the center of our Venn diagram of interest. Being in a band had made me feel like I was finally starting to build the life and identity I wanted.

I had pinned my hopes on the show being an entree into a scene where women mattered, and a way to launch my new life as an activist, organizer, and artist. Instead, the message that the “political” punk bands had brought with them seemed scripted, performative, and divorced from the realities of our lives. Instead it seemed like a way to don an identity to declare your difference. Of course I wanted to do the same, just with feminism. 

The show had ended and the summer was winding down. The days sloshed out before me, adrift. But for now my friends were in front of me. After the show we’d hung out in my parents’ barn, sitting on hay bales and playing cover songs on acoustic guitars. I wasn’t sure how to spend our last day together before they had to load themselves and their guitars back on the Greyhound bus to head two hours south to Boston and then six lurching hours west on I-90 home. 

“We could go to the beach, I guess,” I said, shrugging. It was the site of endless childhood outings, making rudimentary sandcastles with my mom and getting ice cream from the stand with peeling white paint and a plywood cone affixed to its roof, the ice cream painted pink. The beach was where I went when I had nowhere to go, which was most afternoons when I hadn’t been breathing the musty cool air in Erek’s suburban McMansion basement during band practice. I liked to stare out at the empty, curving horizon, imagining the many possible lives beyond here. I liked how it felt to push against the briny wind in the winter, the gray green of the ocean during spring rains, and the crisp blue of the waves and sky as the air grew sharper in fall. Plus, there was free parking in a nearby neighborhood and you could just walk on like you lived there instead of paying the state park fee. I was sure my mom had a state park pass, but I liked the small transgression, a thrill like I was getting away with something. 

“The beach!” Rachel exclaimed, ecstatic.

“Let’s bring our guitars, and have a picnic!” suggested Emily. 

I realized that an ocean beach was novel to them, not just endless scenery from their childhood. 

“There’s even an ice cream stand,” I proposed. “You guys aren’t vegan, right?” 

Rachel was, of course, vegan. 

It was low tide when we got to the beach, smooth, black rocks dotting the wet firm sand, the water in the cove languid, like it too couldn’t be bothered to muster too much effort for an August afternoon. We walked together, Rachel, Emily, and Eugene (Rachel’s boyfriend at the time) from Ithaca, Michelle from New York City, along with my friend Alex who was always hanging around that summer. We were a ragtag bunch: silkscreened band t-shirts, stringy black hair, short skirts, knee socks, cat eye glasses. I carried a red Hello Kitty backpack stuffed with Salt and Vinegar chips and peanut butter sandwiches. Eugene strummed an acoustic guitar as we meandered and sang songs supposedly written by the International Workers of the World. The breeze was at our backs, blowing my curly bob into my face, freshly dyed bright pink with Manic Panic from the strip mall record store. I wanted time to stretch out in that moment, to revel in the feeling of finally belonging. Michelle ran ahead and snapped our picture, the shimmering golden light imprinted on the film. 

Two years later, most of us were all together again. On the morning of September 11th, Rachel, Michelle, Emily, and I crowded into the living room of the college dorm Emily and I shared in Union Square. Michelle had been evacuated from her job as a phone sex operator near the Empire State Building, and her apartment on Stanton Street was inaccessible. Numbly we stared at each other as debris billowed over downtown and sirens screamed in a continuous stream outside our windows. The 13-inch TV played the impact, the smoking hole, the crumbling towers on loop. George Bush came on and threatened to punish the “evildoers” in his affected Texan twang. That night an eerie stillness hung over Manhattan. We went out, breathing acrid air that smelled of singed concrete and hair, to write phrases like “An eye for an eye makes the world blind” and “Say no to racism” on the sidewalks with colorful chalk. The gesture felt more flimsy than hopeful, as we tried to reassure ourselves that our punk politics would be enough in this seemingly new world. 

That day I became an adult and a New Yorker, but far from how I’d imagined either. I had come to New York City for a sense of expansive possibility, to become an activist, a writer, an adult, to belong. In high school I rode the Greyhound an interminable eight hours to visit Michelle. We would spend entire evenings at Kate’s Joint, a vegan diner in the East Village that offered bottomless coffee, free spongy focaccia bread, and fries covered with gloppy vegan gravy and cheese. We talked late into the night about music, politics, and literature until our coffees were cold and we were jittery. 

Moments like these fueled my assumption that in moving to New York I would seamlessly find my place among my people, and settle into adulthood and the life I wanted as if propelled by a gentle August breeze. Newly in the city for college, however, the air itself overwhelmed me with humidity, exhaust, and the stench of rotting garbage. My new classmates seemed self-assured and confidently sexy, and my friends were remote, already settled into their routines. The music scene was under the thrall of the neon spandex, cocaine, and cheap drum machines of electroclash, a far cry from the homemade punk scene I’d venerated. 

The weekend before that Tuesday morning, I had gone to the beach in New York for the first time, invited by another friend I knew from making zines. Emily came along with me. Realizing New York is in fact a series of islands surrounded by beaches accessible by public transit was a revelation. The beach had always been a place I went to settle myself when I lived in Maine, and the searing hot sand and relentless waves of Long Island acted as a balm to an otherwise jarring transition. After the beach trip, I felt reassured I would find my place and I was reinvigorated about New York. That Tuesday morning further scrambled the sense of possibility I felt, as well as who I thought I was or wanted to become. 

Later that first fall, after the caution tape had been removed from much of downtown, but missing flyers still clung to sign posts, Michelle and I returned to Kate’s Joint in search of another epic evening. The fries were soggy, the bread doused in too much oil, and the conversation stilted. Michelle’s life in New York was already established and mine was just beginning. I could feel we were beginning to drift apart. 

As the weather cooled and the sky shifted from the brutalist blue of September to the persistent gray of November, I mourned the loss of the chance to inhabit my imagined NYC life—of being part of an underground art and music scene and circles of passionate activists. All of that still existed, but felt dulled, off-kilter. I was enraged as the President and the country galloped headlong into war, leveraging New York’s pain into an ill-fated quest for vengeance. As I smelled the mixture of concrete and ashes of human lives for months on end, I wanted the country, our politicians, our military, to stop, to take stock, and to reflect on the United States' own accountability for what had happened. I was sickened that while the country proclaimed “we are all New York,” many of them were not at all New York, and actually hated the reality that New York was a diverse, unruly, opinionated city, home of generations of immigrants and radical activism, uninterested in what the rest of the country thought of us. 

I quickly learned that even amongst activists and in my left-leaning college classes, being inflamed with righteous passion for a cause, even if everyone was generally in agreement with you, was supremely uncool. I covered my mourning in cynical detachment and political analysis, using phrases and ideas I’d started learning about in my classes: colonialism, institutionalized racism, and US imperialism. I threw myself into my studies, trying desperately to understand the US’s role in perpetuating the deep, global violence that brought us to that September morning. 

“Things have been lost—so many things have been lost. But how the hell do you grieve a loss that you cannot even pinpoint? How can you lose something you never had?” said writer and researcher Samira Rajabi during a discussion about the theory of ambiguous loss, especially as it relates to how we process and understand traumatic events. After September 11th there was the obvious loss: thousands of lives, a piece of New York’s skyline, an unearned belief in the exceptionalism of the United States to be insulated from the violence of the world we helped create, but also a deeper loss I continued to mourn without realizing it. Rajabi discusses how ambiguous loss — losing something you don’t really have or something that wasn’t really yours to lose — is also related to the loss of an imagined future, or an “assumptive world.” I had spent the end of my teenage years fixated on my life beyond Maine, creating assumptions about who I would become in the future. September 11th ruptured these visions. 

With it came a sudden loss of my own self-absorption that was steeped in the privilege to feel like I was at the center of a larger cultural narrative. The events of that day stripped away the assumption I didn’t even realize I had made: that despite my dedication to social justice, being white and American would somehow shield me from the consequences of the violence to which the US had subjected many parts of the world. I hid this grief from my friends and from myself, ashamed of my own naivete. The possibility of an expansive, more just world, felt like it slammed shut as the PATRIOT Act and curtailing of civil liberties, the profiling, detainment, and deportation of Muslim immigrants, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq rolled out. As the 9/11 commission report famously stated, “It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination.” The possibility of imagining a creative life for myself was subsumed to war and strategies to resist it.

I did stumble into a semblance of a fully adult life in New York, and so did my friends, each on our own paths. The years filled with a series of jobs in art museums and tech startups, a short-lived literary magazine, bands that formed and broke up which necessitated hauling my turquoise Fender all over the city, romantic disappointment, countless summer beach trips, and establishing and losing a home in a neighborhood I’d lived in since I moved out of the dorm Emily and I had shared during freshman year. Sitting in my stark rental apartment, I pinned the photo of punk beach to the empty bulletin board above my new desk, struck by the tender beforeness of that moment. 

The photo was a window into who I was at eighteen, a portal through which I could reach back to that girl. I felt stuck in the beautiful, but remote place that made me who I am, but felt monotonous and ordinary then. I couldn’t wait to leave home so I could become who I thought I was supposed to be. Punk music gave me a shot of adrenaline, and the community of fellow feminist punks I found bolstered me. But this photo, like the light refracted by the salt air, is also saturated with passion, vulnerability, and love. An open heart and a stubborn belief that that was enough to transform the world. 

Standing on that beach next to my new best friends I assumed life would unfold ahead of me like an infinite horizon. I look at that photo now and whisper, “You think you know, but you have no idea,” the message so many adults try to give to headstrong teenagers. But I also feel a quiet patience towards myself that I wasn’t able to muster at that time. I can finally mourn for my lost dreams, the vision of New York and my early adult life that I never got to experience. Even if those dreams were unsustainably romantic and self-centered, I can accept how important to me they were and why it was hard to let them go. I see a sense of possibility, both past and present, that felt so hard to grasp in those years that unfolded just after. Abruptly pushed into mourning again for the loss of my home and imagined future, Michelle’s photo held me in friendship, community, and potential. Returning to the firm, damp sand of that August beach, the tang of salt on my tongue and wind in my fuschia curls, I start to look again towards the horizon. 

——————

Eleanor Whitney is the author of the book Riot Woman, which was published by Microcosm Publishing in 2021 and explores the impact of her teenage, punk activism on her adult life through a series of essays. She is currently pursuing her MFA in creative nonfiction at Queens College.