All day long, I've felt uneasy, unfocused, unsettled. I suppose that it'd be terribly easy to blame it on being bombarded with images from that horrific day a decade ago. In some ways, I thought I that I was a little further along, that the scab would hold. I didn't lose anyone in the attacks, don't have any amazing story of survival, or any first-hand account from that day. My stories from NYC are apocryphal; they're the "friend of a friend" ilk. Still, like most everyone, I remember exactly where I was, exactly what I was doing, and exactly how uprooted the world felt to me in the span of a few short hours. As I climbed into a coworker's car and fled home, I remember the certainty that anything was possible, that maybe the bomb threat on our office building in Atlanta was another imminent attack. That evening, I remember being struck by a news correspondent's grace and composure as she walked the ash and paper-filled streets of lower Manhattan. I remember the haunting silence in the skies near Hartsfield International Airport. I remember getting drunk and reading Hemingway, identifying more than ever with his lost generation.
The decade since has been kind to me. Several weeks after 9/11, I met the woman that I'd later marry, the woman that now carries our child within her. I've grown as a person, as a husband. I've mourned the loss of dear family and friends and have celebrated the arrival friendships and family anew. I've abandoned the corporate world in favor of chasing my dream to be a physician. I've left family and friends on the other side of the country to strike out on this crazy endeavor with my wife and my dog.
In many ways, I feel courageous more often than not. I feel humble, thankful. I am luckier that I deserve to be. Still, when file through the images from that day so many years ago, when I hear the sounds of the chaos, it still fills me with dread, with terror, with anguish.
Go hug someone you love; tell them what they mean to you.
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