I, like many others, watched it happen on a small screen, at first alone and then surrounded by others, our group growing, time slowing, and nothing mattering except those three words: What comes next?
The Duck lived in the city for close to ten years, and recently relocated, had returned to visit one of her friends. He had gone to work, and she was throwing together a backpack so she could galavant around the city in the beautiful weather. There was a sandwich shop she had to visit. She planned to get the sandwich wrapped up in paper so she could lug it to Central Park to this one special place where she liked to sit and regard things as though a monarch taking in the splendors of her regime.
But instead she felt things change that morning. A palpitation of the earth and air and all of their creatures. She saw the streets begin to slowly, inevitably consume themselves in a cloud of ash.
I am not one for glorifying tragedies. You, like I, can imagine the panic, the confusion she must have felt because we felt it too, just not quite as urgently, for, being human, there lies within us the terrible comfort of watching something happen on television. This can't possibly be real, we think. And deep deep down, where we only admit things with the lights off, we believe that it is all right because as long as we're watching it on tv, it is happening to someone else, and we are safe.
Only, New York is a huge place, and while millions of people were just sitting slack jawed next to radios and tv screens, millions of other people were actually fleeing, running, screaming and searching.
As a transplant, I have spent a large portion of my life fighting the label "American". There are so many international stereotypes that go along with the title, least of all a stunning, narcissistic blindness to the issues of the rest of the world, but I am serious when I say I have never felt more American than I did watching the events of September 11th 2001. I felt all of the bravado slip away and reveal what citizens of the states don't want anyone to see.
Like the most popular girl in high school, we are a country so determined to appear to be having the best time to all the other countries, we are letting our grades slip, and our term paper is always overdue.
That morning, America was a hurt, scared child of a country, realizing the rest of the world is actually watching and waiting for the moment where the rhinestone headband slips.
I felt the incredulity, the fear and the madness.
In New York, The Duck was inside those feelings, the nexus of disbelief, of chaos and pure human reaction.
People did unimaginably selfless things that day. People tore away everything they thought made them themselves and looked down into their bones and worked with what they had there.
My concept of what it means to be an American has forever changed in the aftermath. I may poke fun and dodge the comparisons, but I love The Duck, and I love everyone who was in it that day. I love every person, who let themselves realize they were never, and can never be impenetrable. I love every person who touched another person's hand afterward and gave them any form of comfort.
I hope that today, ten years later, the child country America is deciding what it wants to do with the rest of its life because it's seen some shit and it knows it can survive. I hope the people of this country are relishing every moment they have their freedom because they saw first hand how much it costs.
I hope every transplant, like myself, is taking a moment to stop poking fun at how you buggers play football and the ridiculous stuff you call pudding and saying thank you for not freaking out and deporting me after all of this went down.
Because I love you, and I think you have so much more left to do.
