ravnsdaughter

I have an LJ friend who lost her husband in the Towers, 24 years ago. She doesn't post much anymore, and I wonder how she and her daughter are doing today.
I wrote this, back in 2008. I hope their diamonds are shining bright.

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Sept. 11th

I sometimes wonder what it's like to walk a mile in your shoes. Especially today. My mind tries hard to conceive the amount of change that you have gone through. I try to wrap my own minuscule experiences around that one singularity that took you from perfectly normal to forever changed. I've watched you, since that brilliant morning. I've watched as you picked up the pieces, tried to fit them back together as best you could, and tried to move on.

And I've watched as every year, your two steps forward seem to come round to this point again. Not a step back really, but a place of memory and memorial.

You were individuals. You were singular humans, in your singular world. And in one moment, you were thrust together in a way that many...no...most of us don't and will never understand. You were individuals and all at once, you were a city's heartbeat, a city's fear, and a city's loss and strength, all at the same time. Suddenly all those individual faces became part of a greater story. Each was a character on the page of this story, each was a letter, and each letter of this story had a face and a name. But I lost the faces and names in the scope of the story.

My mind wanted to lose myself in that mass becoming. I wanted to distance myself from those humans because, in my humanity, I couldn't grasp so terrible a thing. And for a while, I accomplished that.

And then you started coming apart. I saw beyond the dust and the paper and the smoke. I started seeing faces again. I started seeing people again. And I began to wonder, as I would watch the memorial shows, newscasts, rebroadcasts of that day. I started to grasp the concept that these were individuals having a world moment.

Now, as then, I sit here safe. In my own singular world. My own individual moment.

I wonder what it must be like to walk a mile in your shoes. I can't help but wonder and pray...

I attach my own feelings to you, with this. You had no reason to open the door to your world. You could have chosen to remain one of the nameless individuals I think about, at this time. But you did and I am thankful that I was given this window to look upon.

I wish for you, good things. I wish for you peace. And I wish and pray that for you, those times, that change, transforms you. Much like the pressure of the Earth creates a diamond, that this wasn't unlike knocking a bit of the coal off your surface.

Because as I look at you, and wonder what it must be like, to walk a mile in your shoes, I can see the shining, glittering reflection of each facet of the diamond you are becoming.