5 years

It’s been 5 years and I still have night­mares. Does the pain ever go away?

I have trou­ble sleep­ing. While I thought I was cop­ing well with the loss of friends on 9/11, it stills seems not to be the case. I found myself dream­ing of planes crash­ing into build­ings and peo­ple falling out of them. From the recesses of my mind, the ugli­ness of that day comes up again.

What is it about 5 that is so hard? 4 years wasn’t: it seems the prag­ma­tism had taken the fore­front and that the pain had sub­sided. Noth­ing major changed in my view of those events in the last year and yet, it seems I’m relaps­ing into sor­row. Why is that?

What is it about 5 that is so hard? 3 years was sad but it was also hope­ful. The pain seemed to have less­ened, only com­ing back to the fore­front of my soul when I was closer to ground zero. And hope started to shine through.

It’s just a num­ber but 5 still is painful. 2 years seemed to allow me to become more intro­spec­tive. But some­how, I’m hav­ing a harder time this year. I’ve been work­ing on this entry for weeks now but things would not come out the way I wanted them to. After count­less false starts, I decided that I needed to plough through. It’s the least I can do to aknowl­edge the loss of many friends.

Things are dif­fer­ent now, peo­ple tell me. My life is dif­fer­ent today: I am now mar­ried and have a son… and yet the pain lingers. Munro, our son, doesn’t under­stand our sad­ness. Lucky for him, he was born after. His hap­pi­ness is help­ing soften the blow of that date. It’s also hope­ful: a new gen­er­a­tion com­ing up, maybe one that will build a bet­ter world.

Things are dif­fer­ent now, and yet they are the same: New York is now united in sor­row with Wash­ing­ton DC, Madrid, Istan­bul, Lon­don, Mum­bai, oth­ers cities which have suf­fered at the hands of ter­ror­ist. 5 years, 5 ter­ror­ist acts: who will be next?

Things are dif­fer­ent now. One new build­ing, WTC 7, has finally come up at ground zero but there is still a big hole there. Whether they fill the hole or not seems of lit­tle impor­tance now as it is only a phys­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of our pain, of the hole that is still in our hearts, in our sky­line, in our town.

Car­los Dominguez, Mark Ellis, Melissa Vin­cent, Michael DiPasquale, Cyn­thia Giugliano, Jeremy Glick, David Hal­der­man, Steve Wein­berg, Ger­ard Jean Bap­tiste, Tom McCann, David Vera. I still remem­ber you and I still miss you all.

5 years: it seems like an eter­nity and it seems like yesterday.