The world is unfair. Things like going to the dentist and shaving your legs are such ordinary things, so mundane, while there are people who woke up this morning crying because there is someone missing in the bed next to them, or in the next room, or down the street. There are people crying because two towers fell this morning, and I cried for one quiet moment before going back to taking fingerprints to allow people into the United States. There are people crying because they were there this morning, walking to work or buying breakfast, and they saw the smoke and the fire and the planes.
The world is cruel. I thought, how I hoped, that I would be one of those people who goes their entire life without seeing a dead body. And yet as we passed that bus that had crashed into the mountain and saw that car that no one could have survived in, I saw the man sprawled on the street and I cried. I cried because seven years ago today thousands of people lost their lives clinging to steel and concrete and hundreds of people gave their lives digging through the rubble to bring pieces of their loved ones home. For seven years people have been trying to forget and struggling to remember the last thing they said to their husband or their wife, their sister or brother, their mother, their father, their aunt, their uncle, their cousin, their next door neighbor, and the man they never invited to their parties. For seven years the rest of us have been living our lives, laughing just as loudly, cursing just as strongly, hating just as fiercely. Shouldn't we be speaking less, crying more? Why did we survive and they die? Why were our meaningless lives spared when, seven years ago today, innocent men and women had their lives stolen from them in a cruel and painful way? How can we live our insignificant lives while people are crying because seven years ago today, they stared in horror as the tower that held their loved one crumbled?
The world is distant. I wasn't there this morning, when the sky was filled with smoke and fire and the screams of dying souls. I wasn't there when the buildings fell and the streets jammed and the calls kept coming. I wasn't there when the flag was flown and the police and firemen and volunteers swarmed over the smoldering ruins to find those who survived and the bits of those who didn't. And I'm not there now, while the nation stops in silence for the men and women who died seven years ago, and for the men and women who have died fighting since.
But I was there when the museums and monuments was built. I was there when that woman told us about her son, the man with the red bandanna, who rescued countless people and never made it out. I was there when the other woman told us about how she used to work on the 93rd floor of that tower, and how her department had moved to a different building a week before the towers fell. I was there when there was a hole in the sky and the blue shone down where there should have been towers. I was there, and I cried.
