It’s a somber Aloha Friday.
Every year on this one, AFM runs trimmed down. No word of the week, no rebus, no nudge. Just this.
Twenty-five years.
I was twenty. I woke up in my dorm room that morning, and I don’t think I woke up knowing. I couldn’t tell you how I found out, or what order any of it came in. What I have is the room, the television, and everybody in it trying to work out what it meant. My brother was going to school in lower Manhattan. My college roommate’s father worked at the Pentagon. We were both fortunate. Others were not.
It was the first time in my life I could say I remember exactly where I was. Twenty years old, and nothing had ever reached far enough to do that.
And it happened at a moment. Not over a season, not by degrees — one morning, and everything sorted itself into before it and after it. Twenty-five years of after.
A few weeks later, I wrote about it in my creative writing class and never showed it to anyone. Months on, during a semester in Australia, I recited it out loud for the first time at a hostel in Byron Bay. I dig it up every year.
11 September
We sat on bar stools, scratching at the cracked leather and cheap foam
Watched the bubbles shuffle to the surface of our drinks
We bowed our heads, tipped our glasses, said a prayer
As we stared, eyes glued to the television thinking
Our hearts sinking like the image of those two towers
Minds showered with clouds of smoke, choked
Each moment stretched longer, incensed and evoked
A sense of sand sifting through my fingers, watch the hours pass
recalling those mighty sounds, as the towers crashed
like freight trains screaming passed, remains plastered on the mind
Tell me is it a sign of the times, can we roll back, try to rewind
Realize, be kind, stumble as we rise above the dust, we must
Not forget, though I am hard-pressed to remember
What the days were like before the 11th of September
