Five Year Anniversary

since September 11th changed everything we knew about New York. The city that rested above everyone as a golden world of fantasy literally crumbled before our eyes on television. I spent weeks trying to remember what New York had looked like to me the first time I went, at 17, and couldn't. I couldn't remember the skyline at all and it made me sick to my stomach. Now things have changed so much I can't imagine it without the holes in downtown Manhattan that are the World Trade Towers. At night two glowing posts rise through, faint beams of light stretching what seems to be infinitely towards the sky. To so many people those towers were infinite, their shadow cast over so much of downtown.

Today is gorgeous, which seems especially fitting, since the day this happened was also beautiful. Perfect temperature, blue skies, barely a breeze, warm sun. Everyone was bustling around, getting coffee and papers and preparing for the morning. School children were on their way to school when that sound occurred. I've heard that even now people who were down here for the event jump at sirens and loud noises, even now, when everything is supposed to be so secure. The people who were involved are still trying to adapt to living life outside the Towers.

But I'm happy. This has been the first anniversary I haven't cried for everyone and everything that was lost in those attacks, haven't cried for the injustices that occurred to those of Arabic descent after 9/11 and is still occurring to this day. How my brother and so many others have been sent to participate in a war we should never have been involved in. This year I was calm. I didn't sleep well but have felt okay, have been able to get through my work without much interupption. Someone once told me that I was one of the most sensitive and insensitive people they had ever known. Insensitive (too often!) to the plights of the individual, but overly sensitive to plights that affect large groups of people, such as children in Africa, or civilians in Bosnia. Trees being chopped down in California and Washington. I used to cry driving home from high school through a huge farm that was being turned into a sub-division. Or when the ducks that lived on our river didn't come one year. But my friends talking about their boy troubles or school troubles or life troubles I didn't relate to as well. I'm still not sure if it was a compliment or the worst insult I've ever received.

That's why today is so important to me. I understand that its important to everyone in this country and really all over the world, but to each his own. That which affects our world affects me. That which seems to only affect me does not.