Nine Eleven

In 2004, during my first and only trip to NYC, a friend was touring me around the city. We got off of the train & walked a block when suddenly an overwhelming heaviness came across me, like I'd hit a wall. I stopped in my place and asked where we were going. She pointed straight ahead and said "three years ago, had you looked straight in the air, you'd have been looking at the twin towers."

The thought was flabbergasting. The sorrow, the loss, the devastation was so palpable that even I, a stranger to this magnificent city, could detect that something larger than life had occurred here, on these grounds.

The memory of that day sticks with me more than the day that the events had occurred, simply because it was the first moment that I could begin to really grasp what the people of the city had been through. I heard, through the mouth of my very own friend, how close to home this had hit. I saw her entire being change as she discussed that day. My normally happy, beautiful and vibrant friend, behind the fences blocking us from falling into the pits of where the twin towers had once stood, became a woman weighted down with emotion and loss, pale with remnants of fear. The scars of the event, three years later, were not scars at all but were still very open wounds.

I was a sixteen year-old girl when I heard that two planes had crashed into the Twin Towers. My world, at the time, was what immediately surrounded me. And therefore, I didn't feel the sadness for the people experiencing the devastation first hand. I rather felt my own fears and insecurities come to the surface. It shook up every idea that I'd had about my country and its strength, my life and its regularity, and the security of the future.

What I remember most about that day, looking back from the view-point of a grown adult and not the cocooned perspective that I had at the time, was the haze that I and the people around me were walking through.

The smoke and dust and pollutants released that day in New York City may have been relatively localized to the collapse of the towers, but it also spread invisibly throughout the country, from coast to coast, corner to corner. The ghost of the dust and the haze comes to remind us each and every year that no matter how different, we are also all one in the same in that we are Americans.

And in that way, we are all a little part of each of the individuals who have lost, have been lost, and all of those who have yet to be lost due to the after-effects of the events of September 11th, 2001.

We are one. And we will always remember.