Remember?

I was eleven years old with the terrorists attacked New York City in broad daylight. People say that the Twin Towers fell, but that doesn't really sum up the situation.

When I went to school that day, every TV was on, every classroom oddly chaotic or oddly silent. My dad even came home from work.

A couple years later, we had a memorial assembly, and when I cried, someone asked me if I had known someone who had died in the Towers. I didn't.

The thing is, it wasn't about me. It was about the people who saw fate, and chose their own death. That's what still scares people, nine years later. That hundreds chose to fall rather than burn. Because when you put it that way, you cease thinking of them as victims, and start thinking of them as people. There's no going back once you've imagined a mother's skin boiling off of her face. You always wonder what they thought as they jumped, or if they thought at all. Maybe the last fifteen minuts of that sixty year old man's life was pure fear and heat and pain and that thick, rancid smell of burning hair.

People talk about remembering 9/11, but no one wants to. It is a scar that will never heal for many of us, will ooze blood and pus until death.