20 years.

this year, we had an early soccer game, a play date in the open, breezy air at the park by the river, and it was rather lazy and uneventful.  i am grateful for the distance, and the reflection.  it truly feels like another life, but my body remembers each year.  

different details open up in the corridor of my memory, this year i am thinking about the ways that we tried to volunteer in the days afterward, trying to give our helplessness a job, trying to think of others instead of focusing on how we were feeling and doing.  with kids sleeping on my floor in Union Square, and dorms unable to access, with mental health on edge for each person in the city, we didn't know what to do with ourselves, with all the time of classes cancelled.  trains not running.  phones often busy and cell phones unreliable.  the smell of fire hanging in my nostrils for weeks, but blowing that first day toward Brooklyn and then uptown.  if we had open windows, we all had the silt coating our windowsills and mantles.  the ghosts were all up in our conversations that first night.  we were out in Union Square, attending vigils, rallies, there when the antiwar marches began, and through the next few months as countless families of those missing told us that they did not want retaliation, for more sons and daughters to die. 

a few panels from a zine that Jenna Freedman of the Barnard Zine Library unearthed for the anniversary this year. 

this is what i'm thinking about most this year, in a never-ending quarantine - what do we do with our hands?  we tried to give blood, they didn't need any.  tried to donate food/water/supplies for the rescue, everyone kept wanting to go downtown and i couldn't go there for years.  so I bought dog food for the rescue dogs. 

in 2003, taking the path train into the open carcass of the wreckage unexpectedly set off a panic attack.  20 years later, there is a haze over the direct route to the terror of that day, I have closed off corridors that are harder to navigate in my memory.  collective trauma brought us together, but I knew that I would need to write it down, because I forgot much of it.  still feel this way about ghosts, and they're still here. 

the missing posters are something i've seen in dreams for years.  the North tower falling, the plumes of smoke.  i keep wishing for a new revelation to surface, after 20 years of reflecting, and it's the same thing.  tomorrow isn't promised, we never know what tomorrow will bring, if it will come, so we have to be prepared to look death in the face.  take the afternoons to sit by the river and spend time with good friends.  keep fighting imperialism, oppression, terrorist tactics perpetrated by individuals or governments, systems that reinforce white supremacy. keep questioning the media, keep doing your own research, protect ourselves in the face of a ravaging pandemic, take care of each other.  envision what our world can look like if we take climate change seriously and act with urgency. 

xo

lo