Sometimes, I don’t feel the horror at all, except this time
of year when I stared across the water at the old space refilled with a new
shape after more than a decade of empty space there.
After coming back from the dentist yesterday, the image of a
vacant grin greets me, as if some bully has punched New
York City in the face. And no matter how hard the
dentist works to replace the missing teeth, the smile just isn’t the same.
I used to spend a lot of time on Pier A prior to the attack,
absorbing the tidal surges of this larger river after having spent most of my
life absorbing the lesser urges of smaller rivers like the Passaic .
This river is vast and grand, but never intimate – until
that day when the water reflected the two towers and the smoke belching out of
them, and then did not reflect them any more.
Sometimes, I still see their reflection when I look down
stream from where I stand today; it is an illusion, a bit of wishful thinking,
a memory of a thing long pat, which I need to somehow preserve, even when I
hated what the two towers represented. Somehow, removing them with the
associated slaughter is not an answer and I mourn something unrelated to me as
I would the loss of a member of my family, feeling an assault that I should not
feel, and being here, staring out, I felling the old pain renewed, and still
have no answer for it – like a cure that is worse than the disease of greed it
attempted to cure. There is no excuse for it.
Most times, I simply feel the loss of something, and will
always associate that feeling with this river.
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