11 Sep Remembering September 11

Today is September 11 –  a day that echoes how many people died once. People die all the time. But this time it was special…

It was all over the news. But you know what hurt me most? I was so many kilometers away from the actual facts, from the actual happenings. That I couldn’t feel at all. I was reading the blog of a person who was there then, as she were today. And it shook me to read simple yet pure feelings for things she understood, for things she could fully embrace:

I MISSED…

my friend’s name being read.
Every year I listen for it.
I feel like I let him down.
2,555 days since my boss called me from a bus saying she saw a plane crash into the World Trade Center.
2,555 days since The New Yorker staff huddled in a conference room glued to the television before we were ordered to leave the office.
2,555 days since I walked over 100 blocks to Harlem to get a train home.
2,555 days since cars in the New Canaan train station parking lot sat abandoned, their drivers would never return.
2,555 days since I slept in my parents’ bedroom.
2,751 lives lost.
One second and our lives changed forever.
Seven years … is anything different?

And me? I had no friends there. The only thing that I missed, the only thing I could miss was the confrontation with myself. I wish I were there in the middle of the disaster, so I could fight my own demons between the flames.