Nine-Eleven.

It’s always been a sad day. There’s something morose about September on the whole. It’s undefined. It’s not really summer, but it’s hot, it’s not at all winter, but it sends chills down my spine, it’s not really autumn because the leaves are just beginning to change colour, and it’s not spring at all… because there is nothing new in sight, everything is old by the time it is September, everything is sorta dragging like a dog with one leg that doesn’t work but remains attached to the dog.

I can’t remember a single good September in my life.

 

 

This 9/11 I will especially remember. I’ll relive it over and over again in my mind and with my soul:

I was the twin towers and I was the planes that flew threw them, splitting everything down to rubble. I was the people inside the towers who couldn’t go anywhere and knew they were going to die. I was the people who panicked and jumped to their deaths. I created my own 9/11, in all its glorious death and destruction. I made my own ground zero. A giant hole in the ground, as deep as it is wide.

The thing about tragedies is that we only remember our own.

If you were to ask me about the actual 9/11 I would not have too much to say – I'd share the same recycled info, the stuff already been through the news on loop, the things that were posted on social media, I wouldn't know anything more... because it was not my tragedy. It was not my pain, I didn't "feel" it, it was a little less real for me. But my own tragedy… my own destruction I remember in great detail. It's like a tube stuck in my nose, it's like a thorn in my foot, I feel it constantly... I remember how every single molecule of me felt then and how it feels right now, my head, my heart, my hands, my feet, my legs, my eyes, the inside of my throat where tears seem to be collecting even now as I sit and write this, even when I thought I had nothing more left inside me to make these tears. My eyes should have felt dead by now with all the crying that I have done… but no, my eyes are even more sensitive than ever before. Everything hurts really, in every possible way... the light hurts, the air hurts, and making eye contact hurts.

I hurt. All of me hurts.

 

We all go through our own Nine-Elevens. People tell me I'm a "survivor", that I can get through the bad stuff again and again; just because I've survived some extremely terrible things in my life doesn't mean I excel at enduring pain. If anything, I excel at smiling and making others laugh when my insides feel like the ground zero rubble of the twin towers after the collisions, I excel at standing up even when my legs refuse to, I excel at putting on my kajal even when my eyes hurt, I excel at remembering good things and I excel at understanding that everything changes.

 

Wake me up when September ends.

~ JB