9/11 in New York
To live in New York is to live with the memory woven into daily life. It’s in the firehouse plaques, the fading murals, the names etched in stone. It’s in the way strangers become neighbours.
On the night of September 11, 2001, I was seventeen, sitting on the couch in Perth with my mum. We were watching Rove Live when the program cut away to breaking news. It was 9:30 at night and Sandra Sully was doing her best to remain calm and stoic. The screen showed the towers burning, then falling, and it felt like the world cracked open.
I was on the other side of the planet, in my final year of high school, and yet the images reached across oceans. They didn’t feel real. Too big. Too foreign. Too American. But something in me understood: nothing would be the same after this.
I visited New York a few times while they were cleaning up and while they were rebuilding. It still felt so raw.
(“The pit” 2006)
Two decades later, I’d been in living in Manhattan for 7 years. On the twentieth anniversary, I walked downtown. The air was still, the beams of light shot upward, stitched into the skyline. Thousands of people stood shoulder to shoulder, quiet. Even this city—loud, restless, addicted to noise—knew how to hold its breath.
I thought about the two versions of me: the teenager watching in disbelief from a living room in Perth, and the old bastard with worn out knees standing in silence at the site itself,
To live in Manhattan is to live with the memory woven into daily life. It’s in the firehouse plaques, the fading murals, the names etched in stone. It’s in the way strangers become neighbours, and how we pause when the lights switch on every September.
New York doesn’t do reverence neatly. It doesn’t stop honking or jaywalking or arguing about bagels (it’s the water!). But that’s part of its theology. It remembers in motion, holding grief and survival in the same breath. A man bows his head in the plaza, then shouts at a Grubhub cyclist. Firefighters raise a pint at a bar, laughing as loudly as they mourn. New York’s version of prayer, maybe.
For me, remembering 9/11 is remembering both nights at once: the night I sat with my mum, stunned by what the TV showed us, and the morning I stood among strangers downtown, the air charged with silence.
It’s been 24 years today. Every year, when the sky turns that clear blue, Manhattan remembers. And I remember with it—from both sides of the world.
I was at home when my boyfriend called from his job at NSA where he and his coworkers were not allowed phones, TVs or radios. He asked me to turn on CNN and tell him what happening.
The first tower had already fallen and the second was on fire. Reports were coming in about the attack on the Pentagon building and the hijacked plane still in the air on its way to DC.
The way cable and other news channels kept playing the footage of the towers falling was highly traumatic for everyone, the endless yammering by the commentators speculation about who was behind was so trivial.
Yet life must go on, I had to go teach a yoga class later that evening. I played a recording of a musician chanting a mantra for the souls of those passed and later learned about a directive from BKS Iyengar (the Indian yoga master) for his teachers to instruct students to keep their eyes open during the final rest at the end of classes so that practitioners would not see those images in their minds...
Hey Jason.
My 13 year old son asked that he and I do a minute of silence this morning, to remember everyone who passed that day, and the ones who have passed over the years from illness that came from helping... and, of course, we thought of the loved ones left behind 🩵