My mom gave me a Twin Towers calendar for Christmas — twelve months of various views of the World Trade Center. It hangs beside the door in my kitchen, where I’ve always hung my calendars, and on Saturday I flipped the page up to September. It’s a sunrise shot, the spire of the Greek Orthodox church in the foreground and the vastness of the towers behind it, all bathed in the orangey-red of the early sun. It’s an interesting choice because, composition-wise, it’s not actually a photo of the towers. It’s a photo of the spire in which the towers happen to show up, which they had a way of doing whenever you pointed your camera in a certain direction downtown — like the sky, but shinier.

I miss them. I miss my friends.

In the months after the attacks, I would go to movies set in New York and, almost unaware of doing it, wait to see my friends in an establishing shot. I sort of didn’t want to see them at the same time, because I’d just have to say goodbye to them again, but when they popped up onscreen, I felt like a grandmother: “Now, just hold still and let me get a look at you. Oh, my. Such big, strong boys.” When the film cut back to the action of the plot, I would find myself pitched forward in my seat, longing for them. That twinge got duller and duller over time and eventually faded away altogether, but for a long time, those buildings haunted me, and I welcomed it. I wanted them to haunt me. I wanted them to appear to me silently, searching for rest, like ghosts.

And the towers do haunt us — not just in a metaphorical sense, but in the way that ghosts do. Conventional wisdom on haunting tells us that a ghost who died a violent death will often linger on earth, trying to find peace. Conventional wisdom also tells us that, sometimes, ghosts stay behind for the benefit of the living, knowing that we can’t let go yet, looking after us a little longer before they move on. When the towers manifested themselves to us as twin columns of light, I used to look at them for as long as I could as often as I could, letting them comfort me — two strong, clear pillars of blue-white that went up and up and slowly diffused into the clouds and disappeared into the sky and seemed so lifelike until my eyes told me I could see through them.

Ghosts who died a violent death.

Given enough time, a conversation will always come back to them somehow, no matter where that conversation started. Everyone in the city seems to suffer from a Joe Gould-esque compulsion to keep working on the story of September 11th, shading and polishing and editing, hoping to get it exactly right and finish it and put it aside, but we can’t finish it yet. It’s not over. The towers still show up in our lives every day, usually in little ways: the easel board outside the local firehouse, warped with rain, struggling with Polaroids to tell passing strangers the story of a life; the map in the back seat of a cab, the towers still standing in clumsy 3-D; the calendar in my kitchen and its blank square of a Wednesday like any other.

On my parents’ patio in New Jersey, my brother and I drink beer and whack mosquitoes away from our ankles. I run the bottom of the cold beer bottle over my forehead. We hear the plane first, and then it appears in that break in the trees at the back of the property, curving towards Newark Airport, and we hit pause on our sentences and tilt our heads up slightly. In the last year, I have lost the train of a thousand thoughts that way, and it’s not that I don’t think the plane will get all the way there. I think it will, and so far, it always has. It’s that I don’t hear the plane the same way. The roar of the engines always seems too close, too low. A loud bang on the street sounds too loud, or like more than just a bang. Sirens cluster together too much and go on for too long. Smoky smells need dissecting for traces of hot nut or fireplace or burning trash. A glass shattering on the floor of a pub draws more attention than it should. That day still walks among us.

So, I don’t need reminding. I don’t need retrospectives, or photo essays, or ruminations on the year gone by. I can probably guess what Anna Quindlen has to say on the subject of the anniversary of September 11th; she doesn’t actually have to write a column about it. I don’t need Tom Brokaw or Dick Cheney or Maureen Dowd or Grayson Carter to tell me how to feel about September 11th because I live with the ghost of September 11th, and I live with the ghost of September 11th because I live, period. I get up in the morning, and I go to bed at night. I eat peanut-butter sandwiches. I listen to James Brown. I daydream about Josh Charles. I live, and I see ghosts. Everyone else in the city, in the country, on the planet who got up that morning and who also managed to get home that night lives and sees ghosts, too. Everyone who didn’t spend the minutes before their deaths in anguish and terror, everyone who didn’t jump out a window to leave the world with a measure of dignity, everyone who didn’t call a loved one and tell them they couldn’t come home lives and sees ghosts, too. Everyone who got one of those calls sees ghosts every minute of their waking lives, everywhere they look. Everyone who had to tow an abandoned car out of a suburban garage, everyone who cashed in on a life insurance policy, everyone who still sleeps on her side of the bed even though she has the whole bed to herself. Everyone. Everyone who lived sees ghosts.

The hard part isn’t remembering that day. That day is out in the hall, waiting until we’ve almost fallen asleep before showing up at the foot of the bed. It’s not about to let us forget. The hard part is learning to live with a ghost, and each of us is going to do that differently. I do it by taking a moment to miss my old friends the towers when I see them on TV, and by sniffling a little when George Pataki says that he’s proud of us New Yorkers, and by hoping that the souls of all those who died on September 11th have found rest — the universe owes them that much. I do it by remembering why the ghost is there.

It’s a short entry, but there’s not much else to say; as I said before, the story isn’t over yet. I can wish Don a happy birthday, though. Thanks again, Don.

September 2, 2002

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