Trigger warning: I talk about some dark, violent stuff here. Proceed responsibly.
As I've written elsewhere, I was living across the Hudson from New York City on September 11, 2001. I was very fortunate in that I did not lose anyone myself, while most of the folks I knew did, nor was I in the path of the tons upon tons of collapsing concrete, steel, and flesh that had been the World Trade Center, as pretty much everyone in Manhattan below Canal Street was that day. My life was never in danger.
Yet, ever since then, around this time of year, I feel a tension, a dread. As often as not, it doesn't register consciously at first or, if it does, I assign it to something else happening in my life at that time. But, as the days continue and the calendar changes from late August to September, I remember; I recall why I feel that vague ill-at-ease-ness.
One of the main triggers for me is the weather: the first cool and crisp morning with that "severe clear" blue-in-blue early autumn sky, the way it was that awful Tuesday morning. I used to revel in that sky. I grew up associating it with my father, my hero who flew Air Force fighter jets and who eventually chose to settle in New Mexico because he loved the sky there, so often endlessly azure. The sky always held wonder for me, of the Moon and men who landed on it, of comets and clouds and constellations. But since 9/11, the sky, especially that bottomless sapphire hemisphere of the first days of fall, instills a distant, aching fear -- one that recalls stenching smoke and cement dust, unforeseen exploding horror, and death.
Inevitably, it seems, at this time of year fire or police stations or public schools or -- decreasingly as the decades pass -- individual homes set out hundreds, even thousands of miniature US flags, often representing the 2,977 lives that ended that day. Seeing, every year the week after Labor Day, fields of tiny plastic flags trembling in a soft morning breeze (under that terrible, beautiful sky), wraps my heart in a cold blanket of lead.
Throughout the year -- although, again, decreasingly -- I'll see bumper stickers or window stickers on cars (more often trucks) that say, "Never Forget," and no, we shouldn't forget, but sometimes I wish I could. Not the people who died, nor the selflessness of those who ran toward the danger, nor the lessons learned (complex as those are); no, sometimes I wish I could just look up on those first crisp mornings and take pleasure in the change and feel the soft, protected sadness as I grieve summer's end, without the dread and the memories of sirens and screams and smoke and stink and the sound of bodies thudding into pavement.
That morning, I was driving, trying to get to an appointment west of the Newark airport. As I drove, I could see the smoke pile into the sky, vomited by the black holes in the sides of the towers. I was increasingly panicked, worried whether the dozen or so friends I knew worked there had gotten out, and nearly crashed when I saw the first tower collapse in my rear view mirror. For the next three months, from the new unsafety of my home mere miles directly downwind from the site, I breathed the fumes of the smoldering ashes: burning plastic and rotting meat and dust-enshrouded confusion.
This, and the devastating media about it that I compulsively consumed in the days and weeks after, all comes back to me, in trickles, in rushes, on the days leading up to the 11th of September. Anniversary effects are real. We don't even have to think consciously about them. I have worked with many patients over my career whose acute trauma manifests in their bodies and minds during the weeks surrounding the anniversary of the event and, often, they come into session saying something like, "I feel [agitated, depressed, anxious, in danger, etc.], but I don't have any reason to." Sometimes I remember the anniversary, sometimes they do, sometimes we both forget until later, but the effect can be very consistent: the world leaves marks on us, and those marks can have time stamps.
I don't try to forget that day; it would be useless to do so. I use and build on the lessons I learned from that experience all the time. I am grateful that I was not affected more than I am. But every year, these days and this weather comes around and I feel the marks on my body and mind and it hurts. Every year. Every goddamned year.