Perspective

I didn’t go to sleep. Instead, I was in the living room and happened to catch the last part of The Center of the World (New York: A Documentary Film). The more I watched, the more I realized my whining, my complaints, my petty concerns are just that… petty, insignificant. I am luckier than most. I am young. I have my health. I breathe air. I can walk. I am alive, and I forget that simple fact much too often.

The last hour that I happened to see of the documentary detailed the events of 9/11. I wasn’t expecting to see this, and before I knew it I found myself unable to turn away. I’ve seen the footage a hundred times, and yet… it’s like I’m seeing it for the first time. It still sends chills down my body, no matter how many times I’ve seen the plane, the building.

In the documentary, there were some incredible moments (including a very moving interview with Ed Koch). The flames and the destruction, the smoke and the explosions… those images leave me speechless and numb, too awed to even react. Seeing video footage of the buildings brings about a dull ache, like a large hand crushing my stomach and not letting go. But the part that made me cry was what always makes me cry: the family members, the widows, the children, each one holding up a photograph.

During the film, I’d see a wave, a crowd of people gathered at a memorial, and at first I marvelled at how many were in attendence. But the closer I looked, the more photographs I saw, the more my heart broke. 9/11 went from being this large, horrific event, to these individual, personal losses, these faces that marked all that was destroyed. High school photographs, pictures of fathers and their kids, wedding pictures, photographs of people who were just too goddamn young to have died.

All those people, holding up photographs, all of them so stricken with grief that they can’t even look at the back of the picture… and they turn their eyes away.

And the whole time this passes by, each photograph… I’m looking at every one.