Double-post today!
This is a repost of last year’s essay on the attacks on New York and DC. This is obviously a topic I’m very close to, having lived in Manhattan for 12 years and seen how much it’s changed since 9/11. I first set foot in New York 20 years ago, and it never stopped feeling like the place I was meant to be in this life. I know there are a lot of posts about the 25th anniversary floating around today, so I don’t expect you to have to trudge through another one, but for what it’s worth, these are my thoughts.
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.
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. 2006. 2009. 2010, 2011, 12, 13. Coming over from Australia, I watched New York slowly, gradually rebuild and recover before I moved here in 2014.
(“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.
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 25 years today. Every year, when the sky turns that clear blue, Manhattan remembers. And I remember it, from both sides of the world.
