A friend described his feeling about today in an interesting way.
"When you lose somebody very close to you in your family and the anniversary of their death comes back to remind you of the event, you carry this burden with you all day long. You take it with you when you get your coffee in the morning, when you ride the train, when you go to work, in the evening, you will reflect. There is this sadness inside of you, this memory of a very different reality, sealed inside of you. Nobody, except for you knows why you are sad, not many will pay attention. Unless, of course, you run into somebody who also had a relationship to the same loved one. If you meet on this anniversary, you will probably not even talk about what happened. You will not say anything in particular about it, not mention the living times, the moment of loss... it will be all there, in both of you, both of you will be aware that the other one knows... and whatever conversation happens on that day, will happen on the plattform of this knowledge. Yet it will be a shared, hidden awareness...
Today, everybody in the city shares this experience of loss. Everybody on the subway knows what happened, why everybody else appears today the way they do, everyone knows exactly where they were when it happened, they all have lost a bit of their world... today... we all know... and we just continue..."
It was interesting that he said it, because, of course, I knew exactly what he was talking about, just as he described it... and so we both continued to talk about something completely different...
I imagined the ghosts of all those who died on September 11th 2001 come back... maybe with the ghosts of those who died because of what happened since...
And I imagined that these spirits would probably somehow wish for exactly this kind of mourning. One that is not debilitating, one that does not stop the world every year, not one that uses the date as an excuse to destroy more lives.
Hmm...but that's a very different story...