9/11: How far away it all seems and yet

…(T)wo days before September 11, a friend fetched me for Baltimore from JFK Internatiaonal airport, cruising through a glorious New York sky, really other-worldly on summer nights. 

“Take the rhythm of the skyline, too—how flawlessly it flowed: the Citicorp and IBM huddled way down west, the Empire State, Chrysler, New York Met Life midtown, and closer, the twin black towers of the World Trade Center on the southeastern end.

“Curving into the Verrazzano Narrows, I felt the towers within arms’ reach. My friend said—a bit prophetically, it later turned out—‘Look at the towers for the last time, at least for now,’ and I did…

“Two days later, watching the morning news on a small television set over a bowl of breakfast cereal, the North Tower spewing fire, oozing black smoke, as an airplane the size of a dragonfly suddenly pierced the South Tower, felt unreal except for the panic in the reporters’ voices…

“Three months later, a visit to New York further fractured my heart—on what used to be the World Trade Center, I stared incredulous from an empty sky to a gaping ground. How could it seem so small, so nothing now?

“The smell of burning tarnished the air: sharp and pungent. Thin spirals of smoke seeped off the ground. A powerful stench in the downtown N train I thought must be someone’s mess, blocked our breathing, which later I learned as that of decaying flesh. But I had yet to find the remains of that day…” and got caught up in a weeping America.

Terror has coated our world since, though we keep howling to lure back innocence and peace, tearing down in our hearts the horror and the grieving like that which had rent what began as just any-morning that day.

Year after year since then, survivors have relived surfing down and through 15 stories of ash and debris, being pulled out of collapsing floors and walls, crossing a deep chasm of twisted metal—surviving, with a few saying by a miracle.

Of those who survived, most confessed waking up for years, assailed by guilt for having lived while 2,819 had died, buried perhaps under 1,506,124 tons of debris where no remains have been found by 1,717 families.

Not a few battled depression, and one who died about a week ago of stomach cancer, had wondered if all that trauma and decades of battling the darkness brought on the raging cells.

Somehow flashing hope and faith, the tallest needle in New York’s skyline today, is aptly One World Trade Center on Fulton Street rising over what once was.

Still empty where the Twin Towers had burst and crumbled into a chasm, two nearly an acre each below-ground pools called “Reflecting Absence,” fed by sheer waterfalls, now forever face the heavens, catching its many moods where the towers once stood—while engraved on thick bronze edges, the names of the dead.

A Memorial Museum, with exhibits of the victims’ individual stories, among them 18 of Filipino descent, includes the Vessey Street stairway where many who escaped had scrambled, and a 36-foot steel beam in the shape of a cross, the last recovered during the cleanup.

It had taken long to finalize the memorial as families of victims searched in their grief how best to honor their dead—which would be impossible. As Japanese haiku poet, Issa once tried to externalize his grief on the passing of his son, and on a metaphysical scale, the transience of life: this world of dew/it’s just a world of dew/and yet…

(Quotes edited from “A Visit to a Hollowed Ground,” originally published in The Philippine Daily Inquirer, a personal essay, nominated by Sketchbook poetry.org for the 2011 Pushcart Award).