I remember it like it was yesterday. I think I always will. It was my last year of college, and I was dividing my time, rather unevenly, between living at home and stamping around up in the woods of Annandale. It was a Tuesday - I don't know why I so clearly remember that fact, but it's always one of the first pure facts that comes to mind. I actually slept through the collisions. The first thing I remember is my mother's voice. "Aden, you have to wake up. Wake up. Something is happening. Someone is flying airplanes into the World Trade Center."
And that was how the collective worst day of our lives started. For me at least. It seemed impossible, and for about the first ten minutes or so I was sure it was. I was positive that I was about to wake up, my eyelids snapping open in sickly repulsion from what absolutely had to be a nightmare and nothing more. That sort of thing doesn't happen - except when it does. It wasn't until the first tower caved in on itself that I realized the whole thing had gone so far that we could never come back from it. And as the second tower fell, burying steel and concrete, victims and heroes, I looked over the gaping edge of my life and understood that America was suddenly a very different country.
I've shown the graphic for today to a number of friends, and most of them wondered aloud if the symbolism wasn't backwards. Many authors, pundits and journalists have described my generation as living in the shadow of September 11th. Usually, they are not actually from my generation, so I can understand why they get it wrong. The generation growing up now, the ones that were in grade school or even high school - they are growing up in the shadow of 9-11. They live in a world that is so infinitely different from the one that we lived in just a few years ago. But they are at that crucial age of learning what the world is and how it works, and the lessons they take away from that experience will be forever darkened by what that world has become.
I made the graphic look the way it looks because it is my generation, the twenty-somethings and early thirty-somethings, that carry that day with them. We cast the horrid shadow of that day in every light and feel it creeping beneath our feet at every step. Because we learned about the world when it was sane, and just about when it was our turn to inherit it, that world was shocked into insanity. Even the craziest amongst us were unprepared. We carry with us the memories of the lives we'd hoped to lead and never quite will. We are the ghost of what America might have been. We are so much shattered potential.
I don't live very far from New York City - so close in fact that we never actually call it that here. Sometimes "New York" and sometimes simply "the city" as if to imply that when you live in close proximity to such an amazingly urban place, it really is the only thing you can think of as a city. It was utter panic and unmitigated terror getting in and out of the city for a while. People whispered in conspiratorial dread about bridge bombings, tunnel cave ins, power plant explosions - small scale armageddon carried out by the thousands.
I'll never forget the first time I got back into the city. It was shortly after they'd started running buses through the Lincoln Tunnel. For those of you unfamiliar with the area, the approach ramp to the Lincoln Tunnel runs right along the water front, near Hoboken and Weehawken. The whole way down that ramp, you can see the entire skyline of New York City from Harlem to the Statue of Liberty. The Twin Towers had always stood out from that skyline, two great pillars of glass and steel reaching upwards, making even the other skyscrapers further north look like runts of the litter.
You didn't see simply the absence of the towers. That would have been erie enough. What you saw was a giant column of smoke, hanging in the air in a way that was utterly unnatural. It was as though the most malignant storm cloud you've ever seen had been captured, funneled, and grated across the open sky of New York. It was days from when the towers came down and there was still this impossible twisting scar of smoke and dust and ash trailing southward for miles. Literally too thick to see through, like a wound bleeding into nothing. Granted, the media showed that stretch of debris and ash often over and over. But what most people didn't see was that it hung there for days like a bitter pain that simply would not relent.
The media also showed you little camps set up around ground zero, walls lined with posters and fliers of missing loved ones. But what they could not communicate was the scope or the scale of it all. A city block in New York is a very different thing than in most other places. And in a place
where you can get trodden into the concrete for not moving your ass across the sidewalk fast enough, there was this radial zone of utter discordance. Everything and everyone stopped. You reached out and helped a stranger not because it was the right thing to do but because it was the only thing you could even think of doing. You did it because you so desperately needed to put something right in the mayhem. You did it to drown out the shock. Because you knew at any moment, you might be the next person falling down.
I carry that day with me. I always will. It lives below my skin, ingrained in those parts of my body that never get recycled. It grows older and burrows deeper with each passing year. I stood right on the wild, bright edge and watched the world I was expecting, the world I was ready for and the world I'd grown into an adult understanding, vanish. Like a cheap conjurer's trick, as if to imply that it had never been there in the first place. No flourish, no buffer, just a sudden flash and then the realization that on September 10th, I'd had no idea what the world even was. I walk out of place and out of time, like a refugee from my own future. And while rolling years and heavy footfalls push me further from the day that the music stopped, I can always feel it stretching out to meet me. Passing with me. Anchored to that point when the world split open, and madness walked the streets of New York City.
The Day That The Music Stopped @ www.adennak.com