1,878 miles.
I don’t think back to this day very often. For me in my life in my small world at the time, there was no significant change. I was 9, starting my first week or two in the 4th grade in a new school trying to feel out the hallways and strangers. I don’t really remember much that day, much less than many other individuals that I had talked to in later years. How they were in school when it happened, and they could see the smoke because it was right fucking there. Stories of people going over their last conversation over and over. A classmate of mine, Lawrence, lost his mother.
“When am I going to be able to watch Digimon again?”
That day, I was one of the last few kids to leave school. Everyone else was picked up by their parents, and I was excited to be homework-free. I hopped on the bus and came home and watched smoke and towers and airplanes that was left on television, everyone at home just talking. Why are we watching this? Why is mom home already?
He had a social worker next to him until just before our 5th grade graduation.
I don’t know how I knew or found out, supposedly not through an embarrassing, “Hey who is this lady?”, but I had known. I had known this just like I had seen and remembered one very beautiful picture of my own mother standing with her two friends in one of the towers several years before it went down. Because she worked on 34th street and explored downtown one Sunday, I’d like to think.
If I were at home, I’d hug her. 1,878 miles closer and I’d make sure to spend the day with her. We can go shopping, and grab lunch, and I’d hug her again.
But I’m not at home. She’s probably with my dad playing some mah jong and killing it like she was yesterday. Singing karaoke, and eating dinner with my grandparents. I’d hug all of them.
But I’m not at home, and for some reason, 15 years later, today it’s hitting the most. Maybe it’s because I watched Sully yesterday and was suddenly reminded that I was still at school on January 15, 2009 - a Thursday before Martin Luther King Jr. day - when 155 individuals boarded and successfully evacuated US Airways flight 1549. 3:31PM. Maybe it’s because I’m alone with my thoughts in the middle of Midland, TX where today is a memorial day, but I know in New York, time has stopped just for a little bit. To commemorate, to cry, to love, to remember. Like it always has.
