Sunday marks the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
What follows is a letter I wrote to a friend on the day of the attacks one decade ago.
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Oh my,
The skies are empty and all the streets are quiet. sweet Jesus.
Early in the morning my sister’s husband called her and told her not to leave the house. He told her not to go out. Stay home.
The city is odd and drained and it feels like there is static electricity everywhere. I am standing on the corner, stunned, just looking about—I’m watching the girl with her ice cream cone, she looks like she might cry at any moment. A man in a business suit passes by and he nods solemnly at me, and then Colin comes up in his jean jacket and he tells me that he thinks it odd that the date is the eleventh day of the ninth month–911–what do i make of that? And I just shrug. I am in some kind of shock.
I have never been to New York City but I am in love with it. To me, it represents all that is great about America, all that is great about the world. New York. The skyline makes me dizzy. It’s audacious, ambitious, beautiful and glittering and proud. It’s the best that we have to offer.
I remember watching a concert on television—it was a series of opera arias and the skyline of New York City was the backdrop, and it was gorgeous. It was sunset and the light was reflecting like magic off of the twin towers, and the music was rising and the water was sparkling and it was just an awesome moment. Really. I felt proud of mankind. Look what this race has accomplished!! Look at the beauty, listen…We came crawling from caves and now this–this beauty, this wonder! It was so beautiful, so godly, so magnificent.
And now there is this vacant space pressing against the sky, and it is just too much to digest.
And what can a nation due but line up and donate blood?
Ottawa closed up in terror. I think that the American embassy remained operational, but all the stores across from the building shut down. Driving by late in the afternoon, the embassy was already covered in sympathetic flowers.
Later, in the bar I can tell that something important has taken place because the volume on the television sets is turned up. Some people are paying no attention and my fury rises as they laugh and drink and carry on–oh, I want to tell them to fuck off, I want them right out of there, but I don’t say anything. I sit there sternly looking at the television set, and as I am sitting there a man approaches me and asks if he can sit with me. His name is Ian and his hand shake is faint. I think that he’s drunk, but I also think that he’s a person who does not normally get drunk. He wants to speak to me. He speaks slowly and with great concentration, as if testifying. He is speaking carefully, remembering things–he is telling me about New York City, about his daughter who lives up north, about the sorrow that he has seen, and I am looking at him as the television set casts sound and light down onto us in this very lonely night.