….is the easy part. Picture the worst thing you’ve ever seen happening. Boom, there it is.
Know what’s hard? Figuring out what you’ve forgotten because of 9/11. There’s a myth in society that trauma makes us suppress what traumatized us more than it does anything else.
What it ACTUALLY does, most of the time, is make us suppress the GOOD memories on either side of it. It re-frames our whole understanding of that time in our lives to be about THAT ONE AWFUL THING. It appoints itself as the explanation for everything bad about who we became and puts the onus on the individual to solve some very specific emotional puzzle in order to gain access to some abstract sense of certainty that “Oh okay, NOW I’m an adult. Not just a terrified child trapped in an adult body. Never mind my actual accomplishments
or relationships or relative safety, UN-AIRPLANING THESE BUILDINGS IN MY HEAD was my real job all along and this temporary feeling of certainty that I’ve done this somehow is the reason I can call myself a grownu-OH FUCK IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN WHY GOD WHY”
In case you were wondering,THIS is why people make tasteless jokes about tragedies. It’s not a sideline gawker’s pastime. It’s a weapon.
Because FUCK CLOSURE.
I want this wound to stay open forever. Open, but ineffectual. Incapable of spreading its infection. An inert, useless thing to be mocked like an ugly, mean buoy in an ocean of serenity that regularly gets knocked underwater by personal growth boats that don’t give a fuck where it is and are just trying to get where THEY want to go.
There is no “healing” from 9/11 in a world where the fucking POTUS flirts with the Taliban. If 9/11 is “The Past” to you, you are either lucky, an asshole or both. This could happen again. This could happen WORSE. And if it doesn’t, WHAT WE DID TO THE EARTH could kill us faster.
But, to return to my original point, so could Haley’s Comet.
Every year that goes by I remember my teens differently. Not in a schizophrenic, “It was good/No, actually it was bad” kind of way – clearly, it was always both. No, I mean the nuances. The odd little details, the obsessions and in-jokes and dreams and inspirational people that drifted in and out of focus as I slowly pieced together a picture of what it all means. There’s too much to remember at once. And that’s a relief, because for a long time I was convinced that all that was there was a desert. A place where nothing ever grew. A place made to be “liberated” by invaders. A place with lots of history but no dignity.
Fuck that. It was a garden all along. And it’s still growing….