Feels like not so long ago I was sharing these reflections, but apparently, it's been another year. Which makes it 8 years. That's two consecutive college educations (for most people who aren't on a five-year plan), two Presidential terms, two years short of a decade - gone. Where did the days go? Slowly at first, then just...past.
Now I'm in a new city, still thinking of that day, and all the days since; the lives lost, still others wrecked in a hundred different ways. Who knows what 9/11 means in the land of Hollywood dreams and plastic surgery nightmares? On a day like today, driving back from the airport after dropping off a friend at 6am, I hear the words on the radio: "on this day, 8 years ago," and I change the channel. It's still dark in Los Angeles, there's barely a glimmer of light at horizon's edge, and I can't face the anniversary until the sunlight arrives. I just can't.
As I parallel park across the street from my apartment, the sun's turned the sky pinkish. The day's here, no denying it now. Checking Facebook, wishing some friends happy birthday before reading through the rest of the updates on my status feed: "is remembering," "is thinking about people who died."
Amid the more generic expressions, there is shocking specificity:
"...remembers Nancy, 32."
"What people don't remember: That when you stood there, there was paper from the offices flying all around. I re...member a Far Side cartoon that was probably in someone's cubicle. It landed in my passenger seat, through the sun roof."
A news report over RSS: the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, due to open in 2013 underground to the new World Trade Center buildings currently under development, has the 19 hijackers' martyrdom tapes, and is making quotations and photos of the hijackers available in the museum to show the day from the terrorists' perspective. The Museum's president said these photos would "be displayed along with the quotes as part of the 'witness testimony' in the museum," and added, "no one will come to this museum and leave with a feeling of heroism for the people who committed the crimes that we bear witness to today,"
We all mourn differently, as loss never really vanishes. Is everyone a New Yorker today, I wonder, or is that an artificial way of connecting to something more intensely local than you are, by proclaiming solidarity? Will I go to the September 11 museum, and if I do, will the dread that fills me be similar to the cloud that descends before I go to any Holocaust museum in any state or country? And when at the end of the day, we're still facing a hole in the skyline, have so many more questions than answers, and feel the scars throb as we remember, how can we ever effectively reflect and remember?
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