I was in elementary school when the Twin Towers fell from their skyline. I don’t remember much about that September, except my father was frantically flipping back and forth between news outlets. I lay sideways on our couch watching reccurring footage of large caving buildings burst into ash and smoke. We had never watched the news before.

This might have been the very first time in my life that I can recall my father, a large man of motion, being completely still. I asked him if we could watch something else because I did not like that everyone on the TV was crying. He yelled at me, his voice hard and heartbroken. I retreated upstairs where I could still hear him yelling to an empty room.
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This summer was my first visit to New York City. I spent my time tirelessly searching for Allen Ginsberg’s apartment, Andy Warhol’s factory and the Tiffany’s where Audrey Hepburn stood eating breakfast and tilting her beautiful head while peering into the store window. I found one of the three (Andy Warhol’s factory is now a candy store).

While pondering, I stumbled abruptly into the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. New York’s arm span is so wide that I had originally overlooked visiting the site but I’m honored it didn’t fatefully overlook me.

Breathtaking granite placeholders with names of the victims and brave heroes etched on the side mark the location of where the towers stood. Waterfalls inside each one that disappears into the center (I apologize that my description does not do this justice). I started at the edge of each square, running my fingers over engraved letters of names. Names that I did not know yet mourned over, catching sight of flowers that people had gently placed inside of the letters. Each name was the name of someone else’s favorite person, the best parents, the bravest firemen in the world, saved forever into this stone, but all I could remember was the news.

I could only see from my second grade memory the people, these names, running, falling into each other while the building slid weight down over itself in despair. I slowly apologized to everything and everyone residing in that space. I whispered to the names in the stone how sorry I was for not understanding the day that America’s heart rang so heavy it crumbled, because no one had been able to tell me what had happened.

That day they had lost all of their words. I stood there for hours, watching the water fall and disappear into a space where buildings were once rooted, and lives were once lost. I finally understood the stillness of a large man of motion.