25 years on.

Here’s the thing about September 11th.

It’s not a single day of remembrance. It’s a season.

For those of us who lived in New York City and New Jersey, for those who lived in and near DC and Shanksville, for those whose loved ones were on the planes, “never forget” means something far larger than that one day.

I have clear memories of September 12, 2001. September 13, 14, 15. Today, September 18, too—every date after for a long time is linked inexorably to that blue-skied Tuesday. Not only for the collective movement through grief we were traveling, especially as New Yorkers, but for the compounding trauma of that time.

The days and weeks after September 11th continued continued to unfurl in a cruel bloom in those following days, weeks, and months, like a bruise. Every day bringing new shock, new pain, new loss. Every day a unique agony.

The jolt of seeing soldiers with automatic weapons at the subway turnstiles

The flyers, so many faces, on every non-moving structure below 14th Street

The Islamophobia and war mongering leaping out immediately in terrifying ways, causing more harm and fear

The blood banks, with long lines of donors and nowhere to donate the blood

The hope that more survivors would be found, spiked high at first, waning with dreadful certainty by the hour

The lower Manhattan residents displaced for months, homes filled with toxic smoke, dust, and debris

The stories. So many stories. Overheard on the streets, in delis, at work, on the trains and buses.

Standing in the NYU costume shop, checking on my former teacher, hearing her tell the story of her Park Slope neighborhood firehouse whose outgoing shift climbed onto the fire rig with the incoming shift. No way they were going to stand by while their brothers ran toward the smoke. The firehouse lost 12 men that day. Half the company.

A theater acquaintance saying soberly that he was considering enlisting right away, sending shocks through my system at the dramatic change of course. 

Michael Rolando Richards, the artist-in-residence on the 92nd floor, whose incredible works in bronze include a Tuskegee Airman posed as St. Sebastian, being martyred by airplanes colliding with his body instead of arrows. 

How do you make sense of details like this?
The answer: you don’t.

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“Never forget” is not one date. And our country remains in a state of constant forgetting, or selective forgetting, as instructed by its own President at the time. A week after September 11th was when George W. Bush told Americans to “get down to Disney World in Florida.” 

Go pour your money into the economy, nevermind your collective grief and confusion.

We didn’t know it until October 5, but the anthrax attacks began on September 18, 2001, ushering in a whole new level of fear in the region.

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Every year I get angrier at the ways that day’s losses have been used to fortify the racist, nationalist machinery of empire. Some of my rage surely betrays my privilege and ignorance of not knowing much about that machinery before that date.

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None of this is unique to me. None of this is mine alone. 

And none of this is to say that there is a singular way to experience a historic event that flung wide the doors for ongoing violence, genocide, and dehumanization. Everyone alive then, everyone now dealing intimately with the cruel ways this event changed things, has their own perspective.

I don’t share this for pity, for sympathy. I share it to remind us all to question the ways we’re asked to remember, to forget, to never forget. 

For me, Rebecca Solnit’s observations in “A Paradise Built in Hell” ring truest to my small experience. September 11th did not make me more afraid of my neighbors, either locally or globally. It instilled a deep and visceral faith in ordinary humans to behave in extraordinary ways in the hours and weeks after a crisis, with instincts toward care, aid, support, and love.