Remember, remember…

Uniqlo sweater
Le Chateau skirt (c/o)
Sam Edelman heels
APC bag
Anine Bing sunglasses
Keltie Leanne Designs bracelet (c/o)
CC Lifestyles earrings (c/o)

It was hard to smile for these pictures, despite the breathtaking surroundings. This is Oculus, a train station and shopping centre located at ground zero in downtown Manhattan. It opened earlier this year, fifteen years after 9/11. There are some events, some moments in history of such overwhelming magnitude that they touch everyone in some way. I don’t think about September eleventh often, but I recall that morning vividly – I think almost anyone who was living in North America at that time could tell you exactly where they were when they heard the news, because the lives we lived were changed so profoundly by it. I read an interview with an Afghan woman recently, and the writer asked her if she had ever felt safe; her answer, simply, was no. My own life prior to 9/11 was the diametric opposite of that statement; I never felt unsafe.  My existence was series of school days, piano lessons, gymnastics classes and family vacations; the concept of concern for my safety an utterly foreign one. The world I inhabited was so comfortable and insular that I genuinely believed, until the front page of the Winnipeg Free Press taught me otherwise when I was about five, that war was something that only happened, “in the olden days.” Little did I know – little did we all know, because I don’t think that my views were entirely a product of my age. No one saw what happened on September eleventh coming, not even the people who had advance warning, such was the depth of our North American complacency and ambivalence to the consequences of our governments’ actions. I turned sixteen in 2001. We were just two weeks into the school year and that morning, I was ripping my closet apart trying to decide what to wear. Despite all of the clothes hanging in front of me, it seemed like nothing went together, nothing fit who I wanted to be that day. My Dad, who drove me to school, was downstairs as usual, watching the news while I finished getting ready. When he called for me to come downstairs right away, I brushed him off. When he called me a second time, with more urgency, I still brushed him off, yelling back, “I’ll be down in a minute, I still need to find a shirt.” I finally made it downstairs just in time to see the second airplane crash into the World Trade Centre. I remember watching it happen, but it was as if my eyes were playing tricks on me; I couldn’t reconcile an airplane hitting an office building in New York with something that could happen outside the context of a Hollywood film. That what I saw happened in real time, to real people, seemed impossible. But in the days, and the weeks, and the years that have followed, the reality of what transpired that day slowly sank into the collective North American consciousness. We are not the same as we were, before September eleventh. The reminders of that come at the most mundane times; when we put hand lotion and lip gloss in a plastic bag before boarding an airplane, when we go through routine handbag checks in department stores, when we apply for passports we never used to need to carry. But beyond those small inconveniences, the shock of what happened on that autumn morning fifteen years ago is still reverberating across our continent, although I’m not sure we recognise those aftershocks for what they are anymore. We no longer trust each other; perhaps we never did. But we gave each other the benefit of the doubt. We didn’t put headphones in and look down at the sidewalk when passing strangers in public. Politicians who campaigned on a platform of utter contempt those who are different did not make it to the presidential ballot. I could write twenty more pages on this subject – I could muse about how life has gone on but despite that, how it will never be the same and how, in that way, the events in New York on that idle September morning had exactly the desired effect. I could, but I won’t – better essays than mine have already been published and even better ones will be written in the years to come, as we continue to grapple to come to terms with who we are in the wake of the loss of what we were. I still feel safe. But standing in Oculus on our last morning in New York, I knew that everyone who was there on that morning in 2001 felt safe, too. They had no reason no to. And it was hard to know, in that moment, what broke my heart more; that so many people who lived comfortable, happy North American lives just like mine, with the illusion of nothing but time ahead of them to realise their dreams had everything brutally ripped away from them in a matter of hours, or that so many other people, who inhabited parts of world many of us could not begin to name, lived with so little to lose that suicide, with an enormous amount of collateral damage, seemed like their best available option. It was unbearably sad to know that in the world we now inhabit, fifteen years later, lines have been drawn and we are all expected to choose which heartbreak is greater.

Je suis désolée, mes belles – plus j’écrive, plus j’ai du mal à traduire, surtout lorsque je traite d’un sujet très personnel. Ce n’est pas évident de communiquer ses pensées sur un thème très fort en émotion dans un seul langage, encore moins dans deux ! Je vous reviens en français dès lundi, et entretemps, je vous souhaite un très bon week-end !