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Each year it gets a little easier.

Yesterday I was only dimly aware of the approaching anniversary. This morning it didn’t even occur to me until I was riding the subway and caught sight of the headline on someone’s newspaper. There were no inadvertant countdowns, no subconscious staring at the clock as its hands swept past 8:46.

But because others remember, so too must those of us who wish so desperately to forget.

The remembrances are everywhere: on Facebook, on the news, in those two shafts of light rising skyward from southern Manhattan. And so we have no choice but to grieve. Again.

And grief subsumes. It guides our hand to the darkest places as it seeks out its own indulgence, until, by no conscious choice of our own, we find ourselves actively looking for pain, just to feed this hungry monster that climbed inside our heads so many years ago, this monster that haunts us still, this monster that thrives only on sadness and tears.

And so you look at pictures, the same pictures you see every year. You wonder which one of those ashen faces running up West Broadway is yours, just like you do every year, to just sob gently to yourself at your desk and feed this cruel monster.

You watch the new President deliver a memorial and you realize how weak you are, how much what you really needed at the time was a leader. You remember the morning of the 12th, when you stood on your front steps shaking debris out of your shoes, hearing words like “vigilance” and “revenge” echo from the TV, and you remember how bizarre those words sounded when you were still so shocked and saddened, still so shaken by all the death that happened right in front of your eyes that you weren’t ready for vigilance or revenge and all you needed at that moment was for someone to tell you why.

Why.

You watch the new President and wonder if your monster would look any different if there had only been different leaders at the helm, if your trauma hadn’t been paraded all over the campaign trail the following November. You wonder if your monster would look any different if only your leader hadn’t said bring ‘em on but instead had just told you that the mountains may fall and the Earth may give way and the flesh and the heart may fail but after all our suffering God and grace will restore us and make us strong, firm, and steadfast.

So it is, so it has been, so it must be.

 

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