For me, it happened on TV.  For two or three weeks afterward, I slept with the TV on.  A small white plastic TV with bunny ears in the bedroom corner.  For at least a week there were no commercials. The nights blinked red and white with the persistent drone slotted monotone to tell me, it’s happened, it’s happened, to tell me it happened again.  I grew up near the airport and it was a number of months before I stopped looking up each time a commercial aircraft descended.  A decade later, I listened to the radio.  The radio spoke of the anniversary unanchored in time, as though the catastrophe was present, and I did not hesitate to turn it off.

I work at a school where nearly every child was born after 2001.  They are happy children.  Their school has grass growing on the rooftops, and they compost.  Not only do they compost, they measure their waste in pounds and mark it each day on a graph in the communal play space.  We see small planes fly over the playground, so low we can make out the red stripes on the wings. The children stop what they’re doing and they look up with awe: an airplane!  I am twenty-six now.  I typically experience a quiet moment of awe on every airplane I take: overwhelming emotion at the sight of high-altitude sunsets and black-veined deserts. I fall easily into the formless dreams of flight.  It’s no problem to take off my shoes beforehand.  It’s not that I am unafraid—I am afraid.  I am afraid of sprawling office parks.  I am afraid of video games.  I am afraid of my landscape, its rows of corn designed to self-terminate at the end of each harvest.  I am afraid we fire into Afghanistan from office parks in Maryland.  I fear exponential growth.  Sometimes I walk home late at night and pass a man, who, for a moment, I fear, and when I feel safe again, sometimes I will think about war, and how to be within a war must be to experience fear all the time. 

I used to work at a shelter for battered women. The building has no address, the windows are alarmed, and there are cameras angled around the perimeter.  If I saw people I’d met at the shelter outside, walking downtown or in the grocery store, I was not to smile at them until they smiled at me.  We all signed a confidentiality contract— we signed it for safety.  If you fear the person you love, the leaving often happens on strands of intuition.