Egregoros

I was 5 years old when the 9/11 attacks happened, and it's one of the earliest things I can remember. I have this core memory of standing out in my front yard, looking up and seeing the smoke rising from the direction of New York, joined by pretty much everyone else in my neighborhood who was doing much the same thing. My mother brought me inside soon after, I remember her crying and telling me not to worry, that everything was going to be okay. I didn't fully understand it at the time, but even then I think I might have had some sense of the gravity of what had just happened. Of course growing up right next to New York, the attacks continued to loom large over the rest of my childhood, and over the years I came to fully grasp the true significance and horror of that day. It shocked and traumatized everyone, and I still felt it from the people around me even after most other people from other parts of the country started to move on.

Now it's 25 years later, I'm a grown man living nowhere near New York, but in spite of everything it still haunts the back of my mind to this day. Some of the jokes can be quite funny, I will admit, but they don't take away from the enormous weight that the real event still carries for me. I understand that most people only heard about the attacks from a distance, hell a lot of you weren't born yet. But I saw it with my own two eyes, and that image has stayed with me well into adulthood, and will likely continue to stay with me until I die. Whenever I question when it all started to go wrong, I think back to that moment. I will never forget.