September 11

I did not know any of the people who died in the attacks of September 11.

I woke that morning eighteen years ago to the sound of my roommate's screams. We took her transistor radio and climbed the fire escape of our Brooklyn apartment. From the roof we watched the towers burn. With my brother-in-law we saw the second tower collapse on live TV. The first tower had fallen on our walk over to my sister's apartment. She was teaching at the time in Morningside Heights. Only a half hour passed between the collapse of the first tower and the second, yet one of the clear memories I have of that surreal morning was trying to wrap my head around the unfathomable strangeness of a New York City skyline with only one of the twin towers. By 10:30, of course, both towers were gone. The loss of life was something I hadn't begun to process. 

The subways were down, the phones weren’t working. We walked to meet up with those we could find on this side of the river. By that evening the subways were running, calls getting through. From my boyfriend’s apartment in Fort Greene I spoke with my grandmother in Chelsea and then my parents. They were on vacation in California. They had woken up to a world already gone.

In the days that followed we lit candles and sang songs and wondered how to make sense of thousands of missing people posters. We read a million articles as if some new angle on the disaster would help us shift the smoldering, shapeless pieces back into place. Then we returned to work, resumed routines, looking over our shoulders at first as we walked through Grand Central, wondering, in Times Square, if it was wise to be walking there.

When family members and mourners, or visitors, or whatever we were who did not know anyone who died, who had no personal connection to the tragedy, returned to Ground Zero, it was at first an open wound, not a construction site, just a wreck. And in that wreckage, in that chasm, you could kind of feel the bottomless, colossal loss. 

Already by the second anniversary, it was harder to see the emptiness. You had to walk around, over, on the other side of barricades. Still in the early years of the anniversary, my friend Kristin and I—the roommate whose shrieks had awoken me that September morning—attended church services, wrote messages of hope on tiny white ribbons and tied them to trees. And then finally the memorial opened. And the visits seemed to become more silent, less about seeking and more about simply paying respect. Five years later there was the Oculus and now there is art and memorabilia and there are many, many tourists.

Today at the memorial site I saw a beautiful woman in a black dress putting white roses on one of the names carved in the side of the memorial. I tried but I couldn’t see which name although I did see "Jr." at the end.

On these visits sometimes I listen to the recitation of the names and sometimes I read them.

Christina Sunga Ryook

John Patrick Gallagher

Lesley Anne Thomas

Gregory E. Rodriguez

Sheryl Lynn Rosenbaum

I try to pause on each one that I hear or read. 

Years ago someone chose their names with care, embroidered the letters, maybe, on a pillow for a new baby, waited gleefully to greet his or her new and delicate face. 

Around me visitors were taking panoramic shots and videos of water cascading into the ground.