9/11

[aesc]

There's no weather like a late New York summer. The sun sinks under your skin, so your body remembers the summer that's passing, the breeze tugs you on to fall; between the two, you need to let the day be, with its remarkable blue sky and the clouds hurrying across it.

Eight years ago I walked out into that beautiful day, on my way to campus because I was home alone and for the first time in a long time I wanted other people with me. I rolled my car window down, because the day was beautiful, and I heard the radios of the other cars next to me, voices and voices and voices saying the same thing. In the clear light I saw students gathered together, most of them on cell phones, some of them crying. A group of them stood in front of a building that has, in the small garden outside it, a plaque commemorating three students who died in the PanAm bombing over Lockerbie, and the plants surrounding the plaque were green.

It was a pretty terrible day, for so many reasons. I'm vaguely surprised that I remember what the day was like--the light, the weather, stepping out into the cool late morning with keys in hand. Maybe it's because when I remember seeing the towers on fire for the first time (on VH1, the TV had been set to that when I turned it off the night before), my mind automatically skips forward over the next eight years--over two wars, taking off my shoes at airport checkpoints, yellow SUPPORT OUR TROOPS ribbons, the refusal to think, the distrust, undercurrent of hysteria that's tugged this country in a direction I hate. And it's easier to think about beautiful days than to think about two towers on fire, and the unhappy sense that we're still burning, eight years on.