Sunday marks the 10th Anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
There are memorials, tributes, forecasts, analyses-- so many things people are doing to remember the day. I can't watch or listen to them.
I don't really want to remember it at all.
I don't think I had experienced real fear in my life before that day. By the time I and my colleagues had a grip on what was happening, that fear had become anxiety over what would happen next... an anxiety which lingered for a long time.
A college classmate died that day. Many acquaintances walked and ran as they escaped the dust cloud rushing through the cavernous downtown streets after the towers collapsed. The smell in the City was awful. The pictures of victims lined the exterior walls of the hospital around the corner from the office, victims whose families searched for them in vain.
But thankfully no one I knew intimately was physically harmed.
However I was harmed... in a less physical way. I felt-- and continue to feel-- fear. When the pictures of the smoking towers appear on TV or the audio from radio or TV broadcasts from that day are replayed, the anxiety comes back. It's the heart-racing, body-shaking, sick-from-the-bottom-of-my-stomach kind of anxiety which I would rather not have to experience again.
I never went down to ground zero in the weeks following the attacks. I don't have much interest in visiting the memorial-- or the new Freedom Tower.
I don't know if I ever will.
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