I'd almost forgotten - for the first time ever - that we're approaching the 9/11 anniversary.
I've never been raped, so I hesitate to use that analogy. But I have been mugged - my attackers, with no weapons, hanging out at a 7-Eleven, apparently thought it would be neat to jump and strangle a complete stranger. So they did.
This was a year after September 11. I didn't really need the extra drama/trauma in my life. I'd already spent 9/11 in Washington, DC, alone, watching the smoke from the Pentagon drift across the sky from my living room window. It wasn't a very pleasant experience worrying if we were all going to die, and not having the concern even begin to fade for a good two months.
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| The view from my apartment window on 9/11. The smoke is from the Pentagon. |
I didn't do so well after September 11.
For years, any time I'd hear a loud noise I'd become totally frazzled. I'll never forget the time, a few years later, when a waiter dropped a tray of dishes behind me. I suddenly felt myself choking up, and then breaking into tears, in the middle of dinner with friends, and had no idea why.
For me at least, "remembering September 11" is like someone ripping a scab off a wound that's never completely healed, and never will. It's like someone insisting that I dredge up my mugging again, remember how it felt not being able to breathe, totally helpless on the ground in the dark, because they're concerned that there's a chance I might have forgotten what it felt like to think I was going to die.
Thanks for the concern.
One of these years, I wish the media (and forget the politicians - the Republicans see 9/11 as the ultimate political cudgel, and Democrats, always afraid of seeming under-patriotic, are happy to climb on board the ongoing GOP terror-fest) would sit back and think about how it feels to the nearly 300 million of us or so who were around on that day, terrorized that day and those months, and who, rather than needing to remember September 11, have been trying for eleven years to forget.
