six years

When the anniversary of September 11, 2001 arrives each year, I consume as much of the coverage of the day’s event as I can. I listen to NPR, watch every bit of documentary footage, and read and review pictures and print. Some part of me knows that the draw has to do with a pull toward crime and the macabre. A bigger part of me wants to take time away from the discussion of Britney’s paunch and my own indulgences to gain some perspective and remind myself that this did happen. Planes hit buildings. A jet inverted at more than 500 miles an hour and plowed into the grass in Pennsylvania. People received phone calls from coroners asking them to identify the hands and feet of their loved ones. It isn’t idle curiosity that makes me want to see more, to know more. I feel like I have to expose myself to as much of this as is possible, as if almost by repetition alone I’ll have been witness to this myself, that it will mean something, that it won’t seem so removed and distant.

I hate that remoteness, the detachment that I have for all of this. I hate that I watched for a full 90 minutes a special on those who jumped from the Twin Towers, and that the images didn’t really bother me. It’s hard just to type that. I didn’t cry when I saw their contorted bodies in successive high-zoom images spiraling at high speed through the sky. I’m numb. What they must have faced in those buildings, what the promise of that alternate death must have looked like to make them choose plunging to the pavement as the better option – it does not register. I simply watched, frozen, incredulous, only crying when their families told stories of who the dead had been. How they had loved their two young sons or how they repeatedly showered the living with knowing I love yous in those final minutes. I don’t know how to explain that. The numbness. It somehow feels like a failure.

With close ties to both NYC and DC, I sometimes feel like a failure that I wasn’t in either place at the time. I was in a hospital in central Florida without a television set. I didn’t see the towers fall until I got home that night, blocked by news sites that simply couldn’t hold the weight of the world’s interest. I didn’t bear witness like everyone else did that day. I’m still trying to.

Maybe if my air conditioning had been shut off due to smoke streaming in from the Pentagon, as my parents’ was, this would seem more real to me. Maybe if dozens of commuters’ cars at my NJ train station were ultimately hauled away unclaimed after a series of weeks, as they were in my sisters’ town, the magnitude of this would register. Would break the skin. Then again, maybe it’s a blessing not to feel it.