A New Yorker Remembers 9/11

This has been the view out of my living room window for the last several nights. Well, almost. This picture is taken from the southwest of Manhattan. My view is from the southeast. But for all intents and purposes, it is has been my view.

I must say that when I first observed its return to the skyline a few nights ago, I felt strangely comforted. I love these lights. It would be my greatest desire for the memorial honoring the victims of 9/11 to make these lights a permanent fixture of the Manhattan night skyline. But alas, the tremendous amount of electricity needed to power them is deemed wasteful. Probably right. But even so. I love them.

They are beautiful. They are awe-inspiring. Unless you see them in person, you cannot possibly comprehend how far they shine into the night sky. To give you some sense, if you stand in lower Manhattan with your back turned to their source, you can see them in the sky just in front of your face. In an interesting optical effect, they bend with the curvature of the earth. Like beams from a flashlight, if you look closely, you can see them full of dust-debris in the air. They are mesmerizing. I cannot take my eyes off of them. They are unique. They are silently poignant-- a gentle reminder of the hell that shattered New York and the country on 9/11. They are haunting; a ghostly hint of iconic buildings which no longer grace our skyline. They are clearly a tribute to those who lost their lives that day. These lights reach out to them in the heavens, serving as a palpably imperceptible link between those departed and those left behind.

One of the designers of the tribute shares his thoughts on them here.

I have a special relationship with these lights. This is my third year of commemorating the 9/11 attacks from Brooklyn. And in both the first and second years over here, something very strange happened in the earliest hours of Sept. 11. My first year, I was up late working on something. Couldn't concentrate. Decided to take a quick walk around 12:30 AM. As I stepped out onto the street, I immediately perceived the lights. I decided to walk toward the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, which is a long stretch of pathway that overhangs the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and provides dramatic views of lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge. About a 10 minute walk. When I arrived over there, I was very surprised to see dozens of people wandering around. Usually, at that time of night not many folks are out there. It's hard to explain, but so many of these people seemed distracted. Deep in thought. Restless. I got the strange sense that they had all been drawn there like me. Kind of like Richard Dreyfus being drawn to Devil's Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A couple of people shuffling along in pajama bottoms and slippers. A young couple huddled together staring at the lights from a bench. Some people taking pictures. A group with a telescope. Some people lighting candles. But mostly it was just strangers whispering to one another in the dark. Somber, reflective silence outlined by the sound of warm, rushing air and humming tires on the Expressway below. I stayed at the Promenade for about two hours. Looking at the lights. Remembering 9/11 and the victims. Thinking about New York and perceiving its beauty at night. Thinking about my time in New York and how different life has been here since the events of that day. Thinking about my future and career. Experiencing a severe episode of melancholy. Of something lost. Of the hope in renewal. Personally and as part of a community.

Last year, I was ensconsed in a sound sleep at 3am on Sept. 11. Suddenly, I sat straight up in bed. Wide awake. I got up, kind of stirred around the apartment with certainty in the fact that I wouldn't be able to get back to sleep. With no idea about what to do, and having quickly dismissed the notion of cleaning the kitchen or something, I peered out my front window and saw the lights again. I immediately decided to return to the Promenade. Upon my arrival, I was surprised to see a repeat of the scene I had encountered the year before. Same shuffling, distracted, reflective, restless people. Were they unable to sleep like me? What had drawn them here at 3am? Had they lost loved ones? Were they just returning from a night on the town? Did they live in the neighborhood or had they come from afar? Soon I entered the familiar and comforting meditative melancholy of the year before. As in the previous year, tears welled as I was overcome with emotion. An hour or so later, I returned home and went to sleep. The interludes on the Promenade seem to calm a restless spirit. My restless spirit, anyway.

Last night, I planned to go. I decided I would head over to the Promenade around midnight. But for some reason this year, they didn't turn on the lights the night before the anniversary. Strange, because they had been on all week. But I went to Brooklyn Heights anyway. Sure enough, I encountered this same crowd, even though the lights were not on. I again sat and thought and walked and thought some more. Eventually I found my way home and crawled into bed.

Four years later, we New Yorkers still feel it. With or without the lights. Sure the rest of the country feels it, too. But we feel it in our own way. In a way unlike anything I have ever experienced and I wasn't even in the country the day it happened. But I can attest to the way we have responded on a psychic level. And New York has never been the same. We all bear a scar that is hard to quantify or express. This is a fumbling example, but in a way which allowed a group of Yuppie-type friends sitting around a dinner table to talk about the nightmares they continued to have nearly a year after the event. That they had them, was perhaps not so surprising. But that they all volunteered them...one after another....in monotone voices and with unfocused eyes seemed rather unique. Haunting is the only way to describe it. And though such conversations rarely take place anymore, we New Yorkers still feel it. And the lights draw us out in the middle of the night to confront it.

It's actually kind of odd how I even came to call myself a New Yorker. Though I've lived here for six years, it took the 9/11 attacks to galvanize my love for this city and to make me really feel part of it. To that point, I had always felt like a long-term tourist. But I'm not. No matter where I go or what I do, I will always be a New Yorker. Because I still feel it. And I believe I always will.

And as they are for all restless, sleepless New Yorkers, the lights are mine. They will always be mine.