Twenty Years On

 It's going to feel weird typing up a 9/11 remembrance post 4-5 days after the 20th anniversary, but it's been a crazy few days and I was traveling for the actual 20th anniversary.  So it's taken me until now to fully form thoughts and think about even saying something about it.

Ten years ago I also posted a little something for the tenth anniversary of the day New York City and the rest of the world stood still, in awe and terror, and here I am again for the twentieth.

Damn, it's really been that long.

Sometimes it feels like yesterday I was a sixteen-year-old, about two weeks off a plane leaving JFK to go to Madrid with a layover in CDG that ended up being four hours delayed because someone on the flight stood up to check her luggage in the overhead bin before the plane had leveled out, knocking herself in the face, and demanding the plane turn around, back to NYC, where she could get treated by a doctor.  The plane was already an hour delayed (we arrived at the terminal when the plane was supposed to have already taken off, so...) so this only added an extra few hours, especially when you consider the plane had to refuel.  So that was fun.  I do somehow remember looking out the window as the plane rounded Manhattan and turned around, seeing the Twin Towers.  Looking back, this doesn't make much sense from a logistical perspective, but honestly, for some reason, I'm still convinced I saw them, and this was before all hell broke loose.

One World Trade Center as seen from Chinatown

Once arriving back in Spain, after the drive from Madrid to our house in Málaga, I finished packing up for the coming school year in Germany.  We drove from Málaga to our old home in the Basque Country, and then crossed the border into France after camping for a night outside of Pamplona, and from there continued driving to the Black Forest in Germany, where I attended one semester of my freshman year and was entering my sophomore year... my first full year.

I remember going to the Carrefour (basically the European version of a Wal-Mart or Target SuperCenter for those of you Americans) in Mulhouse, right across the Rhine river in France, about half an hour from my boarding school.  While there, I saw a really cool poster of the New York City skyline... one of those mosaic posters that were all the rage in the early 2000s, full of pictures of the City coming together to form a picture of the World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan.  I hung it proudly above my bed in my new dorm room.

[ETA: My previous post about 9/11 states it was a Carrefour in Málaga.  I'm 90% sure it was actually Mulhouse since I remember seeing the price in French francs (this was before the euro... damn, I'm old) and I'm also pretty sure I was already at school when we got it.  Only my parents would remember for sure, and maybe I'll ask.]

Lower Manhattan from Newport, Jersey City

A week and a half later, on a Tuesday afternoon, I sat in study hall putzing around on the internet, trying to keep up with American news and media.  I'd stayed with a cousin in Indiana for two weeks in July and August and asked my cousin and my aunt to record the MTV VMAs for me, and the package with the VHS tape (remember those?) was supposed to arrive shortly.  Next period was World History with a teacher I loved, and a subject I loved.  He let us out early... instead of 3:50 pm he let us out at 3:30.  My dorm was in town, and it was still warm out, so I walked back to the dorm by myself, quietly, probably listening to music.

When I reached the top of the hill where the dorm was located, right outside of town, one of the 8th graders in the dorm came running out.

"Someone's here!  I was told to come tell you guys that there was a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City!"  She was frantic.  Oh well, I thought, I used to live in the Basque Country where there were bombs and terrorist attacks just about every week.  Americans don't really know terrorism.  It was true; the late '90s and early '00s were some of the Basque Nationalist terrorist group ETA's most active years.  A week before we'd moved there in 1997 a bomb went off in the building that was supposed to be my sister's preschool.  In late 1999 a bomb went off in the parking garage in my best friend's apartment complex, destroying everything and damaging all 8 buildings in the complex.  Her parents' car was in the last line of cars that weren't damaged by the blast.  I remembered the Oklahoma City bombing, and vaguely remembered hearing about the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, and I even remembered hearing about the USS Cole in early 2000.  But not once did I think of what I would actually see after I dropped off my bookbag in my room, glanced at my poster, and walked into the TV room where CNN, the only channel in English we had access to at the time, to see smoke emanating from the Pentagon.

Financial District from the Brooklyn Bridge

Yes, dear readers, my first view of the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, was of the Pentagon.

My heart dropped into my stomach because I, a kid who'd spent the last 4 years living in Europe anyway, knew what the Pentagon was and what an attack on it meant.

And when the camera turned to focus on what was unfolding in Manhattan, the live coverage of that sick, crunching crackle of the North Tower collapsing onto itself in a cloud of ash, dust, and vaporized office buildings with people still inside, I knew that what had happened was far, oh, far worse than what I'd experienced in the Basque Country.  The South Tower had already collapsed, but the replays, over and over and over again, the images of the second plane, that United Airlines Boeing 767 Flight 175 out of Boston Logan, making that gut-wrenching turn into the South Tower with the North Tower already in flames, the wingtip cutting through steel and concrete like a machete and the burst of orange out the other side will forever be etched onto my retinas until the day I die.

Financial District from Brooklyn

For the next few hours I was glued to the TV.  I only stopped to eat.  My parents called from Málaga, and I sobbed.  I don't remember doing homework that night.  I just remember sitting on my bed, feeling deathly alone as I stared at the poster above my bed, the two towers that no longer existed, that to me represented everything I loved about the country I was convinced was my true home, looming down at me.

I don't remember any hugs.  I don't remember anyone coming by me to say anything.  I remember there was an assembly at school the next morning to talk about it.

Lower Manhattan from Exchange Place, Jersey City

But there was no grief counseling.  There were no discussions beyond "we just need to process this and we're here for you".  This was a school full of TCK, Third Culture Kids, most of whom had grown up in some country that wasn't the US.  The US wasn't home for them.  Most of them had never even been to New York.  I'm not saying this out of pity, I'm not saying this out of sympathy, I'm saying it because it was a fact, and what had affected me so deeply, what had made me feel like was losing everything I cared about, even just an image or idea.  Hell, I'd never even been to the Twin Towers.  The closest I'd been was on a family trip to the Statue of Liberty back in 1993.  My family still has that photo.  My dad shared it on Facebook the other day.  I've shared it on Instagram.  It's my two brothers and me with my parents, the Twin Towers in the background.  It was just a normal trip during one of our usual trips to New Jersey during the summer.  I'd only been in NYC a few times since: mostly trips to the French and Spanish consulates to get our visa applications processed.

Steel rubble from the Twin Towers in Jersey City

Twenty years on, and the experience still haunts me.

The experience of a sixteen-year-old kid, confused about so many things.  As a teenager I didn't want to live in Europe anymore, I felt I belonged back in the US.  I was obsessed with New York City even though I'd rarely been there; I'd grown up in the Midwest, far from any major city, and I cried myself to sleep for an entire week when my family moved to Spain.

It wasn't until college when I realized that I couldn't relate to Americans, that the US had stopped being a place I was familiar with, a place I could relate to, and a place I was no longer able to make friends in.

View of Manhattan from the Edge in Hudson Yards

But that doesn't change the fact that I was left deeply traumatized by loss on that day.  That no one came to me, wrapped me in a hug, and told me "You are allowed to grieve, and mourn, and feel all this pain you have for a world and a place you love."  My parents were in another country, and I wouldn't see them again for another three months.  All I had were phone calls, and I couldn't call them.  They had to call me.  There were no counseling services, no mental health experts, no grief counselors.  Just an assumption that while the images we'd seen on TV were shocking, it was in a country none of us could relate to or understand and it was out of our control.  Even while knowing that so many lives were lost, it was not enough to talk to us about it and talk through our grief.  I'm sure I was not the only person to struggle with the grief of that day.

Manhattan and Jersey City from the Edge

In the twenty years since, I've also been given the impression that I'm not allowed to feel the way I do because I didn't have family members who lost their lives.  I have an uncle who, as a first responder in Pennsylvania, made it to NYC at the moment when no further help was needed.  My family members in the NY/NJ area donated blood.  I have an aunt who worked as a staffer with Top Secret clearance at the Pentagon, and possibly in the wing that was destroyed by Flight 77.  I'm not sure about that part though.

Oculus and WTC Memorial pools from the 1 WTC observatory

But I never lost anyone personally.  I'm not "from" New York City.  My family had stopped living in New Jersey four years prior, and my grandparents no longer lived there either.  I had no skin in the game.  So I have always felt that I was never allowed to feel the way I did, and the way I still do, about the attacks.

Maybe there are some of you out there who still think that I'm not.  And that's fair.

1 WTC reflected off the 9/11 Museum

If there's anything I've learned in the past few years, however, is that our feelings are valid.  Other people may not like them, and maybe we will understand how wrong we were about them in the future, but right now, at this moment, we are allowed to feel them.  We are allowed to feel whatever emotions we have.  After 9/11, I was knee-deep in Republican and Conservative rhetoric about "bombing them out of existence".  It's a fact I hate about myself to this day, understanding the atrocities that were committed in the name of "National Security" and "Democracy".  Understanding the aftermath and the havoc that those policies have wreaked on innocent human lives that are still being affected to this day.  But I'll cop to that, that those thoughts were not okay, but at the same time, I was still allowed to have them.  I was allowed to feel grief and pain as a teenager.  I've changed since then, realized the error of my beliefs at the time and have grown to acknowledge that I had them and why.  But my emotions were still valid even if they led to unhealthy and toxic mindsets and political views.

The world is not black and white.  It's a whole gamut of grays and nuance.

Lower Manhattan from Exchange Place

And to my inner child, my inner scared, terrified, sixteen-year-old self who watched what felt like the world explode, and implode, who watched those fires burn and consume and collapse everything around them in a way that felt like everything she absolutely loved and held dear:

"It may not be okay, and it may not become okay.  But your grief is real.  Your pain is real.  You are allowed to feel everything no one else seems to be allowing you to feel because they're dealing with their pain and grief in different ways than you are and none of us is better or worse than you.  And one day, you'll become someone who validates others in the way you're being validated now, and you can mourn and grieve as much as you need."

1 WTC

I've interspersed this post with pictures of the "new" Manhattan, of the rebuilding that's gone on in the twenty years since.  Of the iconic new One World Trade (commonly nicknamed the "Freedom Tower" even though it has not been the official name since before construction began), its monumental status as the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere and one of, if not the, safest skyscraper of its kind.  During Golden Hour it's magical, at night it's beautiful, and during the day it's impressive.  It's a compromise by the city and citizens... one tower instead of two, rectangular instead of spiked, but still representative of the rebuilding process and the story behind why the building is there to begin with.  We all know what it's doing there.  Every time we look at it we know how new it is.  I'm a New Yorker now.  Thirty years of wishing and dreaming of being a New Yorker (or as close as one can be while also living in North Jersey and being a very proud Jersey Girl), watching my favorite city get destroyed, then rebuilt, cementing its status as the most famous city in the world (I mean, even Uzbeks and Ushuaians have heard about New York!).  And the most resilient.

I am so proud to finally call this city home.  From across the Hudson in New Jersey, of course.  Real New Yorkers know you really don't want to live in New York City.