Promise Me

It started early this year. The sky isn't the proper shade of blue; it's too deep, too alive. The clouds are too full. Only July and yet, I feel it. The anxious fear, smoky whispers curling around my thoughts. I imagine my fear is the same color as those wispy September clouds.

It's her fault. It's because I see her every day, rising above, a constant reminder of the horror. But I forgive her, because she also brings a promise for the future.

In the morning she reflects the sun. Sometimes a warm and brilliant gold, sometimes a sharp, blinding silver that seems to harden the Hudson River into steel at her feet. She commands attention, and you can't help but answer that silent demand.

She stands right at the gates of Hell, a sentinel to watch over the lost. If you ever saw that smoldering pile, if your senses were ever assaulted by that indescribable stench of burning death, you would know why I call that place Hell. I remember walking the streets a few weeks after the worst day, dust and broken glass at my feet. Papers lifted and twisted by the wind that whips through urban canyons. Lighted candles and a chain link fence that was the most gruesome sight of all, because it was where hope went to die. Photos, letters, "missing" posters scribbled by a child's hand, but you knew. You just knew. Daddy wasn't coming home. The feeling of helplessness was unbearable. It only added to my shame.

I cannot fully explain the magnitude of my terror that day. I remember it as if it were yesterday, vivid and painfully sharp. I remember the way the air felt that morning; how crisp it was, the kind of subtle chill that marks the start of a late summer day. I remember the color of the sky, the whispy clouds, the smell of the dew, and the way the early morning sun felt like grains of sand in my tired eyes. And I remember nearly losing myself in a fear unlike any I have never known.

I had felt terror before; as a child I was in a terrible car crash that nearly killed my younger sister. Crunching, breaking, shattering glass, and both my baby sisters screaming. So I knew what panic was. And yet it paled in comparison to this. This was raw and visceral. Perhaps because now I was an adult. At 9, there was nothing I could have done. And that was understandable and acceptable to me, because I had had such a limited experience of the world. But at 23, I was grown. I was not helpless. And yet there I was, once again a terrified child trapped in the passenger seat, doomed to watch as the ground came rushing up and my life changed forever.

But when the death I watched in New York suddenly exploded at my feet in Washington, something changed. Looking back, it seems strange that I would feel such fear watching those horrors unfold 300 miles away, and yet when death was just minutes from home, calm resolve took over. 

My mother begged me to leave, come home. And I, this woman who just moments before had been completely blinded by fear, explained quite calmly to my mother that the Chesapeake Bay Bridge was a viable target, (where that brilliant bit of common sense came from I have no idea), and leaving was not an option. I had a job to do.


I went back to work, having just left an hour before. What else could I have done? The day still seemed so normal, a day like any other, and yet just miles away one of the most secure buildings in the world was burning. I immersed myself for hours in the ordered chaos to which I had grown accustomed. Until midday, when it became clear there was nothing anyone could do. Sleep came slowly, almost painfully, for weeks. Months. Some nights it still does.

It's hard to explain what I lost that day. It wasn't a loved one, it wasn't innocence. But something inside me died. Or perhaps it was awakened; a darkness, cold and empty, the kind that consumes and devours. It returns every year around this time, clawing at my insides, burning behind my eyes, icy dread pooling in my veins. Helpless, useless, hopeless. 


The flashbacks are my own private slice of hell. They come along with the icy void. It's almost as if the images and emotions of that entire day are condensed into a single second. It washes over me, through me, and I am lost. The sobs come quickly, stealing my breath. I instinctively bury my face in my hands, rocking, perhaps in some futile attempt to comfort myself. It's as if I stop existing for a moment, swallowed alive by that newborn emptiness. How can I explain this trauma? It's not a physical wound, or even a coherent thought. It is intangible, unseen, a shadow that disappears when you turn your head. But it is very real.

As is my shame. Perhaps that is what awakened in me. The realization that even as adults, we are little more than children. It is still possible to be helpless and useless. And there is a time you must stand idly by and do nothing while everything you know crumbles to dust at your feet. I know that I have no right to feel this way, and yet every year I indulge in the torment. My shame is endless.

But I have hope now, that perhaps I may finally find a reprieve. Maybe this silent sentinel can do for me what I have been unable to do for myself for more than a decade, and calm the madness that steals my late summer thoughts. I have hope that one day I will be able to look at her without tears in my eyes and a tightness in my throat. For while she is a reminder of my shame and horror, she is also a promise for the future.