Reflections on 9/11, 24 years later

The box on the calendar marking today looks like any other. A plain rectangle that, for the words “Patriot Day,” bears no special characters. Yet for the resonance of 9/11, that box has all the dimensionality of three objects that reflect three different ways in which we can engage with the memory of a day we’ve said that we’ll “never forget.”

The day, of course, is September 11, 2001. The day when al-Qaida attacked the United States in the homeland, killing nearly 3,000 people. Thousands more were killed as a consequence of the toxins and wars that those attacks unleashed.

First, the borders delineating today take on the look of a window. It’s a window that we clean perhaps once a year, a small chore we accept in order to more clearly look out on the landscape of a collective trauma.

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