A Man From the South

A story strangely familiar, or, if you prefer the usual cliché, eerily familiar.

A man from the South arrives in New York City planning to marry his sweetheart who lives there, and to move there or thereabout.  It is October 2001. For the time being he is staying with his somewhat quarrelsome relatives, who don't look too kindly on his relationship, and one of whom has known his sweetheart for some time.

He sees her daily, they plan their future life, and they begin looking for a place to live.   A month passes and the woman breaks up the relationship without an explanation.   Devastated, he returns South, where his friends who had once prayed for his success are surprised to see him back.  He falls into a deep depression, starts drinking heavily, thinks suicidal thoughts.

After some time, he is led to a doctor who prescribes powerful tranquilizers.   His condition improves.  He continues thinking of the time in New York, still unable to understand what happened and why.  Was it his relatives who sabotaged the relationship? Was it the woman's relatives? Her priest? The Tarot cards that she sometimes consulted despite being religious?  Was it something he said, did?  He doesn't know, cannot conclude anything.

Years pass.  Four years after the disastrous affair, he watches on television  an interview with a film director who is making a film about 9/11, the event which took place less than a month before his arrival in New York.   The director, who lives in New York City, relates how deeply 9/11 had affected him.  And he tells the interviewer about his family doctor who recently asked him what happened to his family that it's been having health problems in the past four years.  Not serious health problems, but problems that the family had not experienced earlier.  And the film director realized that it was 9/11 that affected him and his family so strongly that it affected their physical well being.

Our man now thought that he finally got a clue about the events in his own life four years earlier in New York.   Perhaps it was 9/11, which did not affect him as powerfully at the time, as he was busy planning the new stage of his  life, perhaps it was what affected his then sweetheart.  Perhaps.