From my window I can see two beams of light that shine so brightly and resolutely that you can imagine there is a generator in heaven somewhere harvesting their stores of energy. When you go to the spot where the lights beam away from the earth you're actually met with a twinge of disappointment that the lights aren't a naturally occurring phenomena, but no, they are as manmade as the light behind this computer screen.   For every night in September two ghost towers dominate the downtown Manhattan skyline. In the first few days of September it feels almost perfect, that those lights have always been there and have always pierced right through the limits of the atmosphere. By the 11th you realize that those lights aren't present for the other 11 months of the year. And that's how it should be. It's a memorial you don't want to accustom to yourself to. You don't want to see them every night if only for the fact that you never want there to be a moment when you look at them and all you see are two vertical breaks in the night.

9/11 was the prettiest day this world has ever known. It was the type of day that inspired thousands of pastoral poems, the type of day where you can almost hear Pan's flutes playing the wind. By the terms of string theory there is another universe where the twin towers still stand and no beams of light plead to St. Peter every night for 30 nights to be allowed entrance. If a string theorist could ever pinpoint exactly where two universes diverge, he wouldn't ever come much closer than the twin towers. Somewhere in the blanket timespace grid of our universe(or another one) there is a beautiful New York day which was tucked to sleep by a very gentle sunset over the Hudson of a million shades of orange. But that's not our truth. Pan's flutes sounded discordant and chaotic on our day and New York was put to sleep in a blanket of noise, ash, and fear.

I look at those beams of light memorializing a day that if anything belonged to hell and I wonder what it must have been like to be in the city on that day. I don't think too long because I can't. I wasn't here then and I don't know. I can only look at my hands and verify that the flesh is still in place. I can only feel the goosebumps on my arm and imagine how it must feel if goosebumps covered my entire body and brain for so long that I forget what normal feels like. I wonder when normal crept back into New York City. Did it happen all of a sudden in a shockwave? Or was it more like a bugbite, the kind that you don't notice until the mosquito is miles away enjoying the taste of your blood? How did it happen? One day did you wake up and go through your routine only thinking about what came next? Did you itch your leg and wonder why? Did you look at the red mark and suddenly remember everything, especially that you've been itchy for weeks?

I don't look out of my window and see what's not there. I see two beams of lightforce that remind 9 million people of what is there. That people all over the world look at one spot and think and remember and protect a memory is the true memorial. That we don't forget and we don't ever let those two beams of light become normal is testament to an awareness that embodies humanity. We see you death, we look into your eyes and we're afraid and we're tortured and we're small, infinitesimally small, but still, all we see is light. We see the light of what could have been a very beautiful day. We see the ghostly light of the actual day through the lens of our memory. All we see is light looking at us through thousands of pairs of eyes that we hope and we pray are all accounted for in heaven.

Please, always remember.

with love