That Day

9/11 came and went and I feel like shit for not feeling more like shit. I was there. I saw it with my own eyes. The anchorperson didn't tell me the first building fell, my brain struggled to make sense of what it had just seen. The air smelled like dead people for weeks. To this day, and living at another end of the country, I still cannot eat outside after seeing people sit at an outdoor cafe eating Mexican food as the soot and ash that was 3000 lives hung over them in the air.

Somewhere on all of those backup discs and CDs and drives are my accounts, my photos, the story of my frozen mind and body. They lay buried in a morass like all that debris trucked over to the Staten Island dump to be sifted through to find the DNA remains of the missing dead. Someone was going to put my Flash movies in the Smithsonian collection. I don't recall if I ever sent them to her.

My life changed forever that day. All these years later, it seems less a change and more just the fabric of my being. There were tears today, but many fewer. Jingoism has replaced feeling and originality. War and politics have taken over for compassion and grace. Heroism is gone. Reverence, solemnity, and unity have gone with it. All that is left are those two holes in the ground and the carnival of ugliness that surrounds them.

Rest in peace, dear Larry. For we shall not.