Lately, when I close my eyes at night, my thoughts strangely tunnel back to 2001 and one particular fireman. It was September, I was 22 years old living, in New York, and the world around me had turned to powder. Not the delightful dander of snow globe souvenirs or storybook Manhattan Christmases, but the dust and the ash, the gray and black debris, of a page in history that was burning even as it was being written.
A week or so after the Twin Towers were brought down, Ground Zero was still an open wound. It would be that way for a long time, I mean the smoking rubble. The smoke hovered everywhere above and around us. Even where we lived in Washington Heights, way uptown, we could smell what we assumed was burnt metal and charred flesh. A friend and I felt like we needed to go downtown to where it happened. To see it for ourselves; to stand at the epicenter.