Six Years Later ...

... this is still the best writing I have seen on the topic.  Stark, honest, and  poetic. A tiny excerpt:

I try to get my brain to deal with what my eyes are telling it, but it's just not sinking in, and just then a hot fragment of something or other lands on my head, and I duck my head to shake it free, and as I do, I see a shirt cuff land gently on the sidewalk a few feet away. I stare at that, too. "Dude, look at that, this is seriously seriously bad," I start to say to Bob, who's digging in his bag for his tape recorder, but I don't have time, because I've turned my attention back to the building again, and the building has chosen that moment to die.

I re-read this piece every year.  Click on the link and settle in.  It's beautiful and awful.

Comments

[CircusKelli]

I will admit to being afraid to click that link. Just as I was finally feeling like I was coming out of my own personal "great depression", 9/11/01 happened. I watched the towers fall over and over again in newscasts, felt loss and bewilderment in the pit of my stomach and cried for days and days... and I was lucky enough not to have had any "personal loss" from this horrible, horrible tragedy. I can not imagine what it must have been like for the people of New York, and those who felt the very direct blow of the loss.

I still have a newspaper from the day after that I have never read. I know I should read it, I know I should click that link... I'm afraid of it all being "too real" again...

[The Kept Woman]

It's things like this that keep 9/11 a real, live event. Sometimes our memory can play tricks on us and things that were so emtionally charged a week, a month, a year ago suddenly seem distant and unattached.

P.S. Ahhhhh-haaaaa! I didn't know you were back...sort of...anywho...addicting, isn't it?

[wordgirl]

It's the part about the shirt cuff that gets me the most.

[Laura]

I remember this one, and her story is timeless, Nils. I felt as if I was walking along with her, zig zagging up and down the streets and breathing in the dust and ashes, trying to get her home.
I hope we never have to go through this again.

[William]

Thanks Nils.

[Squirl]

This is so different from most things you read about 9/11.

[Lowa]

Hey Nils, have you seen this??

http://flickr.com/photos/i2i/sets/72157594159147674/

WOW! I need to get over there. I wondered why you ever left the prairies...now I see!!!