5

I remember on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, when there were still ambulances going down toward the site, and the smoke hadn't hit us hard yet up where I live, and I was sitting around with my husband (who walked home after watching it happen from 8 blocks away) and BIL in our living room watching it roll again and again, the announcers kept saying, "The world is going to be different forever."

I couldn't imagine 5 years from then. But here we are, and everything's different, and everything's still the same.

There's still that hole in our city and our country, but it's scarred over. A big nasty keloid scar. Those of us that were here (and I imagine in DC, too) still hold that trauma in our bodies. Yes, we still tear up when the weather is the same (just like it is today) or they start rolling the faces or names on TV. And we're still scared--that NYT headline about New Yorkers still being scared was greeted with a "No shit" by everyone I talked to about it. I was in our diner when one of the huge black military helicopters flew over us the other day. Our waiter was there taking our order, and I said to him in a low voice so the kids wouldn't hear, "Me asusta," and he answered "Yo tambien." It's a multilingual, multicultural kind of fear.

And I'm tired and angry, too. Angry that almost as many soldiers have died in Iraq as people died in the Trade Center. And incensed that our president has diverted money and intelligence away from protecting our country (shipping containers, anyone? water reservoirs? airport security?) and into this quicksand of a war that he lied about form the get-go. It almost seems deliberate, that by putting our money and people over in Iraq we're even more defenseless here (Katrina?) and are therefore scared and think we need him even more because he talks like a cowboy. To me it's irresponsible, and bordering on treason, to expose your own people so blatantly to risk while also fanning the flames of conflict and inviting more attacks. But at least he's keeping us safe from finding treatments for Parkinson's.

So, yeah. Tired and angry and sad and scared. I haven't recovered physically. I would never volunteer my story, but I still know it by heart--sequence, pauses, inflections. I'll probably cry out on the street today, and I know I'll see other people crying as they walk.

But there are these kids. A few minutes ago El Chico said, out of the blue, "Life sure is getting nice today." And it mostly is. What can I do today? Work on our emergency preparedness, do some reading on midterm elections and who needs the most help, and be gentle with myself and everyone else today.

Do you want to talk? Need to talk? Go ahead in the comments. If you don't want to say anything, that's fine, too.

Comments

[Melissa]

I think about it everyday. Besides my father dying, it was the worst day of my life. I can still remember the smell (and I was in Brooklyn!) Sometimes it feels like a lifetime ago and then other times it feels like it was yesterday. I don't think any of us will ever fully "recover". And I am one of the lucky ones...I didn't know any of the people who perished..but it's like I knew them all. Hold your sons tight and get through the day.

[Bethany]

I watched the trailer for Flight 93 and I shook my head, "Too soon." I said, "Too soon." My husband reminded me, "It's been five years." But it doesn't feel like its been that long.

I wish I had something uplifting and insightful to say, but I just don't.

Hang in there today.

[Amy]

I live in Canada, but close enough to have been terribly scared. (I'm maybe two hours driving distance from the border to Niagara Falls/New York). I was in a highrise building at work when the music on the radio cut off and the announcer started talking about a plane flying into a building. It seemed surreal. It was confusing. Was this a joke? Like War of the Worlds? Then somehow there was a TV and New York was burning. I'm tearing up right now. It's close to my heart. My pain, those people losing their lives, I'm too close, I have to get out. It still makes my chest tighten up and I can't believe it has already been 5 years. Screw politics, we are neighbours, we are friends, we didn't deserve this. My heart goes out to all of the families who are grieving, and to all of the families that are dealing with the aftermath...still. We're here for you.

[JennyK]

If anything, I'm *more* afraid today that another attack could happen. After all, since 9/11 this administration has done nothing but further exacerbate things with the whole Iraq detour instead of focusing on the real enemy.

I'm also more afraid because now I have even more to lose. This morning as I drove in I reviewed the emergency pick-up sites where the school would take our kids in the event of another attack....great way to spend a Monday morning.

[iheartnewyork]

I completely agree with your views about our president and his actions since 9/11. I'm continually disgusted and enraged. My husband worked in the WTC at Aon -- 92nd floor of the South Tower. But he was late to work that day because it was our son's first day of preschool. So, so many of his colleagues and friends were not so lucky. Now my son is in 3rd grade -- I can scarcely believe it. The wound still feels so raw. I'm listening to the names being read on WNYC this morning, in between my work meetings. I just feel like I need to take the time to hear and remember, even though it hurts so much. Why does it have to be such a beautiful September day again today?

Kirsten

[Rebekah]

I was living in San Diego on September 11, 2001 but watched everything unfold live on TV (I was up early with a migraine.) I have to say that this anniversary hits me harder and harder now that we live here in NYC. I take the attacks personally ... this is my home now. I frequently walk the streets that were devastated, I live down the street from a fire station that lost some of it's men ... it is no longer an abstract incident that happened "somewhere else to someone else". The pain and loss is here and now and part of the people I live with every day. My heart breaks for all of those who are re-living the loss(es) of loved ones today.

[Diane]

I'm still not over it, I can't get over it. Almost every day -- twice on some days -- I look at the (digital) clock and it says 9:11, and my involuntary mutter is "Those bastards." All of them: the ones who'd put me in a chador, the ones who want to keep me in fear and ignorance forever, just so they can stay in power.

What's terrifying now is the way Bush & Co. are being permitted by the press to rewrite history, to arrange all the context to suit their own ends. And the double-bind of another attack, twisted to work both ways: since we haven't been hit again, we need to keep the current powers-that-be, but if we HAD been hit again, that would prove we needed them too!

How do we break that logic down enough to create a change come November, when even the discourse of patriotism has been co-opted by the far Right? Where are the men and women -- in Congress, in the press --who can swing the pendulum back, and help us reclaim the country we love?

[Elizabeth]

It's grey and rainy here in DC, so at least we're not facing another damn blue sky.

I made it through just two of the updates to the profiles in loss in the New York Times before I was crying too hard to read.

We were at a birthday party yesterday for 5 year old twins, born September 12, 2001, in New York. How can 5 years be so long and so little time at the same time?

[MoMo]

I was out of the country and all by myself when it happened so I never experienced the immediate shock. Today when I woke up I listened to a replay of a radio broadcast that occurred as it was happening and it felt like I was truly experiencing the panic for the first time. Then I started to read the NYT profiles and I just cried. It feels like we will all feel like this forever -- scared, overwhelmed, helpless. I want so much for my son to grow up not feeling those things.

[Diane]

What Elizabeth said, too -- about the damned weather. It's sunny and clear here in MA, exactly the same. God, would a few clouds be too much to ask?

[Susie]

I was 8 months pregnant with my second child when my husband nearly died in the WTC on 9/11. The odd thing is that he didn't even work in the building. He was there for a meeting. Ironically, a large part of his job now is the rebuilding of lower Manhattan. So I guess you could say that the events of 9/11/2001 play a regular role in our everyday lives.

For months after that day, my husband had a recurring dream that he was riding up and down in the elevators of the WTC. Nothing was wrong, he was just contendedly riding the elevators. Maybe it's just nature's way of letting him relive the day with a peaceful outcome.

[wealhtheow]

I've been sort of worrying this in the back of my head all day, like a loose tooth. I love all my friends in California, where I'm from, but they do not get it. They have no idea what it was like, to think you might never see your husband again, to think if you'd gone into work half an hour later you'd have been right there when the plane went into the Pentagon, to smell the smoke and bodies burning in your bedroom the next morning, to listen as your neighbor told you about the horrific clean-up duty he was assigned to at the Pentagon. They have no idea, and it's nice to come here with others who were in the center of it. Thanks for providing this space, Moxie.

And also--BORDERING on treason?? Only the fact that I live in a government town keeps me from saying more (I'd have to jeopardize my husband's clearance).

[Jamie]

I was waiting for 9/11 to roll around because I wanted to find out if I was pregnant. I was. I spent the whole day thinking, "What a crazy world to bring a child into."

That child is sitting near me with the paper in front of him, saying, "How did there get to be a fire? Is it good that some of the bad guys died in the airplane crash?"

He was born at home in May of 2002, on the day when the NYT front page showed the machines hauling away the last of the rubble from the WTC site. Our old-fashioned doctor had us spread newspaper on the bed and the living room floor for absorbency. I remember opening out the papers between contractions, seeing the headlines from all the weeks of halting recovery in NYC, war in Afghanistan, bloodshed in Israel.

That evening my 9/11 baby was born, soaking those newspapers with amniotic fluid and meconium and just a bit of blood -- the messiness of new life.

Thinking of all of you in NYC today.

[mirabel]

Moxie, thanks for providing this opportunity to comment. One of my favorite things about your blog is your writing about life in New York.

I moved to California from the east coast a few weeks before September 11th happened, and it felt wrong to be so physically far away from a place I loved that was hurting. Although I have never lived in New York (though my dad was raised there and I have visited many, many times), I have always felt at home there, and I still hope to be a New Yorker one day. I recently moved back home to the east cost, and the sadness surrounding 9/11 feels so much more real here than it ever did in CA. The memories seemed to have faded more quickly out there, and that never felt right, even if it did make sense on some level. I was so lucky to not lose anyone close in the nightmare, but I still could not read the profiles in the Times today without crying.

My first trip back to New York after 9/11 was in 2003, and I got choked up when I saw the skyline for the first time without the Towers. I wondered, "What if there is another terrorist attack today?" But then I thought of those of you who were there on that day, are still there, who are scared and who love your city even more than I could imagine, and I thought, "This is why I love this place. This is why I will always come back and I will not let my fear prevent me."

[rocketdyke]

i was mad all day that the weather had to be like this, that weird unreal niceness. why couldnt it rain, or be too hot, or something?

i feel like a terrible person saying this, but i couldnt stop getting mad at all the people on the news and radio and in the paper insisting that we all have to remember, remember and acknowledge and remember all day. i dont want to remember, you know? i just dont. im really sorry that some people have to remember every day that someone they loved died, but people die in terrible tragedies all the time, and the rest of us are not all forced to acknowledge and remember things that we are just not ready to think about all day.

that said, the only article i read all day that i appreciated was in the onion:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/52325

[T]

Amen. Treason is right.

[em]

I was lived in NYC for 9 years and I was there on that day. Now I live far away, but 9/11 and all I experienced on that day is never far from my thoughts (every time I see a plane I am reminded).

9/11 left a hole in my heart which will always be with me. The only way I could get rid of the constant feeling of dread and fear was to leave NYC (even while it broke my heart to leave). I didn't realise what a shadow it had cast on my soul until I had moved away...

[Amy]

I moved to the west coast not long after September 11. Today I miss my city. That day is absolutely seared into my memory. It is, strangely, the weeks that followed that are all a big blur. I was having a conversation with my husband the other day about when we had a memorial service for his cousin who died. He insists it was that weekend but in my mind it was weeks later. I'm still not sure.

But that day...that day I remember everything. I remember which seat I was sitting in on the crosstown bus when a women stepped on her cell phone starting sobbing, my first indication that something was terribly wrong. I remember watching the, at first, narrow column of smoke rising from the towers from my office window uptown. And I remember the massive, billowing clowds of smoke and ash that rolled through the streets, engulfing all of lower Manhattan after the first tower fell. I remember being completely unable to comprehend what I had just seen right in front of my eyes and fully expecting, any minute, to see the tower I had just watched dissapear, reemerge from behind the dust and smoke. I remember seeing my brother in law, a rookie cop who had been blown 30 feet into a concrete wall when the towers fell, standing in the doorway of his parents apartment with dust and concrete still in his hair when he finally stumbled home that night. I remember standing in line at one of the makeshift "victims centers" that night and listening to everyone around me mumbling the companies and floors their loved ones had trudged off to that morning...Marsh and McClennon, Aon, Morgan Stanley, Cantor Fitzgereld... I remember getting home after midnight and seeing a thank you card in my mailbox for a wedding shower present I had given to the lovely woman that my husband's missing cousin was to marry in less than a month. I remember my formarly stoic husband waking up at 3am and screaming and sobbing with the realization that his cousin, one among thousands, was gone forever.

I remember. Even if I wanted to I could never forget.

Thanks for providing the space to get that out. I've been needing to say that all day.

[iheartnewyork]

I also wanted to come back to say thank you for providing the space to talk about all these complex feelings. It felt so good to get it out.

Also wanted to point you in this direction, in case you haven't already seen:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/

Kirsten

[theresa]

For me, not being a resident of NYC but still on the East Coast, not having lost anyone close to me but still having known people who did die (Cantor Fitzgerald had how many employees who'd graduated from my college around the same time?), I have found it easy to immerse myself in the daily details of my life, the tiny life I live at home with my son, my husband, my job, my neighbors and friends. For the most part, I managed to avoid thinking about 9/11. It only intruded into my little life twice this year. Once during the fire alarm in our office this year on 9/11, which was terribly mismanaged (for example, the fire exit in our stairwell was stuck shut) and had me thinking about how this was just another example of the ineptitude of this government (I work for a fed agency).
The second time, Moxie, was when I thought about you and yours and worried about how you were getting through this anniversary, which I know is so hard for you.