For Elliot and the faith you have in me.
I opened the sliding door onto our back patio and my younger brother followed. He slid the door shut behind him, an act that silenced the television. The sky was perfectly blue, the sun perfectly warm. We stood on our back porch in Brooklyn, watching the gray-black smoke floating away.
My brother was still significantly shorter than me when he was six years old. He wrapped his small hands around four small plastic cups of water as he carried them over to the patio table. Our plan was to make clouds so it would rain, so the smoke could be cleared and the firefighters could save everybody faster. My nine-year-old mind was so sure that we could put clouds in the sky. An hour (maybe more, maybe less) later, my brother and I looked at the cups, looked up at the sun, looked up at the now gray smoke, looked back at the cups, then at each other.
“The water isn’t evaporating,” I said definitively.
“No, I think some of it did,” my brother said with the brightest blue eyes I’ve ever looked into. We don’t think about the people who have died, we can’t imagine how many lives are unraveling, we don’t know about the huge evil that drove this day to hell.
For years afterward, I would play the events of September 11, 2001 over and over again in my mind, the way that the news channels played footage of the crumpled towers on a loop that day. I continued to remember so I would never forget what evil, pain, fear, panic, and even a nation looked like. I thought about the people on those flights, imagined their absolute terror that must have paralyzed each of them, their tears and rushed breaths, the last words offered up as pray-er, their instantaneous deaths. I thought about the ones in the towers—looking out the windows, their eyes begging for help, clutching the walls of the very structure that would deliver their deaths.
That day went on too long, I remember. For hours and hours my siblings and extended family huddled around our television, everyone wearing the same empty look. Nobody spoke, save for the news reporters whose brows were turned up in fear.
Now, I am twenty-two years old and I walk to Ground Zero on September 11, 2014. My sadness and unanswered questions are thirteen years old today. The streets aren’t any more crowded than they would be on a normal Thursday afternoon in the financial district; yet everyone around me seems to be walking too quickly. Marines and uniformed police officers stand dispersed in the streets.
“Is the memorial open today?” I ask when I don’t see a way in, but only a way out. The police officer looks me in the eye and I look for the sadness but I only see worry. “Only for family members until six, then it’ll be open to the public.” I think this is very appropriate; their grief and loss are thirteen years old today, their memories of loved ones just as vivid. I stand for a few minutes and study the tower erected in place of the fallen ones. I look up at the perfectly blue sky and the perfectly warm sun and I think that this new tower must reach into heaven, my God, it’s so tall. From where I stand, it seems like there are three triangles: two that point upward, and an inverted one between them. The tower, I realize, points up and points down. Up and down.
Up, like the direction our eyes were pointed that day–at the television, at the death filled sky, at heaven–like the direction the smoke and fires had risen in order to destroy; like the direction my eyes would turn each time I stood on my porch, expecting to see two towers erected; like the direction our heroes were climbing when they acted heroically and died heroically; like the direc-tion so many climbed on their way into work that morning, never to climb–
Down, where the towers inevitably crumbled, taking so many; where the stares of loved ones were pulled as they watched their worst nightmares come to life; where our tears fell as we looked on.
On that day, thirteen years ago, my brother and I stood in confused silence for another thirty seconds when it suddenly dawned on me. “Oh! If we pour the water on the floor, the sun can help it evaporate into clouds faster!” My brother didn’t question the nine-and-a-half-year-old me. We dumped the cups of water on the porch, watched it slowly fade away, until the paved ce-ment was the same light gray color as the drifting smoke in the sky. Disappeared into thin air… There, I thought. My brother and I go back inside, and wait for the clouds to form.