9.11.01
It almost feels cliche to say September 11, 2001 was a breathtakingly beautiful day in New York City because it has been said countless times before. It was a perfect Autumn day. My day didn’t start off like my most. On September 10, 2001, I buried a beloved and cherished member of my family after a lengthy battle with a terminal disease. As I stepped onto the train bound for Lower Manhattan a little after eight in the morning the next day, hoping to put the worst day of my life behind me with a full day of work a welcome distraction from the emptiness, I remember thinking to myself, it is too beautiful a day to be this sad. I never imagined, however, that went I stepped out on to the street corner of Wall Street about fifty minutes later to the closest thing to hell on Earth I hope to ever witness, I was about to experience the worst day of my life.
After eleven years, the memories are still as raw and as open as they ever were and yet I know I am among the lucky ones. I saw things and felt things that I will never forget. Sometimes, in my nightmares, I flashback to that instant when my office building shook and saw the dust cloud that was once North Tower of the World Trade Center come barreling straight down Wall Street, pushing up against my windows and realizing that I had just felt thousands of people die. Sometimes, it is the eerie silence after the second tower fell that haunts me most, as if the city itself could not find a sound to express what just happened. Other times, it is the long walk uptown towards the Manhattan Bridge that I remember most, seeing office workers who was caught in the dust clouds of the collapse trying desperately to get a clean breath. And realizing that I was breathing in dust and ash from what was once human beings. But mostly, it is smell is what haunts me most, a smell that would linger in Lower Manhattan for months as the fires on the pile still burned.
Beyond the human loss and as a born and bred New Yorker, I miss those buildings. Seeing them on the horizon after trips away from the city meant that I was almost home. They were a symbol of my home and they were torn away from me in an act of unspeakable violence and violation. Sometimes, in my mind, I go back to World Trade Center plaza, the Austin Tobin Plaza, and I go to one of my favorite spots, beyond the fountain and at the foot of those two massive towers. I look up and the building stretch up into the sky, beyond what my mind can conceive of as tall. Sometimes, I go back to the lobby of the World Trade Center, all gleaming glass, pristine, steel open space, perfect arches and those flags hanging over the second level. When I was a kid, I always thought, this is what living in the future would look like. None of this exists in reality anymore, only in my memory and that is, perhaps, the one thing I’ve never been able to grasp. Those buildings were here and now they are gone, like the world’s greatest magic trick. Where did they go? After all this time, I still think that if I blink hard enough and open my eyes, they will be there again.
In this election year, eleven years on, as the country seems more divided and tattered than we’ve ever been over ideology and petty politics, I wish we would reflect more on what that day really taught us. I know when I was caught in the middle utter chaos, wondering if I was going to make it out of Lower Manhattan alive, my initial thoughts weren’t angry or hateful. My first thoughts weren’t about our differences, but how we were the same. We are in all in this together. Walking along the Manhattan Bridge, in silence and shock, we all had one goal, get home. Get home to the people we loved. Just get home. Those who died that day never got that chance and I know now that getting to come home is not a guarantee, it is a gift.
