On September 11, 2001, I was taking my eighth grade standardized test--the ISTEP exam. I remember standing third in line for the water fountain outside our classroom when a boy ran up to us and blurted, "A plane crashed into the World Trade Center in New York!"
I rolled my eyes. I assumed that the boy--a trouble-maker--was making up a terrible lie to delay our test. As I walked into the classroom, however, I noticed that the television had been turned on. We were told that in light of this national emergency, the school was halting the test. We would spend the day watching the news coverage. I swear I did not blink. Smoke was billowing from both towers. I watched each of them collapse, and part of my innocence and sense of security fell with them. My incompletely developed, adolescent brain could only stare in horror and think, "This looks like a scene from a movie. This can't be real." I could only process the buildings falling. The men and women seen jumping were beyond my comprehension.
During my high school band's trip to New York in March of 2003, I saw Ground Zero for the first time. A cross of fused I-beams from the towers stood above a pit of dirt, dump trucks, and intricate ramps. Its perfect proportions draped with a shroud-like sheet of steel was awe-inspiring. I had to believe that God was in this place, that it had not been abandoned as it would be so easy to believe. Looking into the pit, I felt an overwhelming sense of sadness; there were people whose remains had yet to be uncovered, identified, and returned to their families lying broken and unrecognizable in the debris. Amid the towering Manhattan skyline, this depression sent such a deluge of emotion coursing through my body that I could not fathom how those directly affected could bear to look into its lack of substance.
The image of Ground Zero was haunting, and it mingled with the footage of 9/11 that will forever be burned into my brain. When I took the opportunity to return to Manhattan six years later, I was curious as to how much the site had changed. I knew that post-9/11 sentiment, both good and bad, was still very much alive--patriotism, yes, but also Islamaphobia. I wondered if Ground Zero had undergone as little change as had happened in the minds of Americans. After journeying from my lodgings on 189th St. all the way down to the site, my friend and I were disappointed to find barricades covering Ground Zero from view. Cranes loomed overhead, but even when we looked from the highest point on the St. Paul's Chapel grounds nearby, we could not see what was happening inside the fence. I thought that perhaps, while the construction of the memorial was taking place, the site should remain covered, allowing the memorial to rise from my last memory of Ground Zero like a phoenix.
A little less than a month ago, my husband took me to New York as my Christmas present. He had never been, and I was ecstatic to be able to share the city with him, accompanied by a college friend with whom we would stay. As we traveled to the South Street Seaport on our first day, I had few thoughts of the World Trade Center memorial. To be honest, I forgot how close the two were. As my husband, friend, and I exited the subway station on Fulton Street, I turned to my right. Standing out in the skyline, incomplete but already possessing a sort of reverence, One World Tower rose from the ashes.
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