Everything Is Different Now

I flew past the buildings two days before the planes hit them.

In those days planes bound for LaGuardia often lapped Lower Manhattan before making the final turn, steering remarkably close to the skyscrapers massed just below. They did not seem at all vulnerable but rather impregnable and permanent, fixed points for pilots who had lost their way. As gigantic as they were, as out of human scale, they still managed to whisper to travelers that they had come home. It was September 9, 2001, about 6 p.m., with the sun sinking in the sky. When I looked out the airplane window and saw the Twin Towers, they struck me with the force of revelation. It wasn’t simply that they stood so improbably close that they seemed touchable; it was that they were ablaze. They were bathed in light, their steel ribs shellacked with the incandescence of the evening, and so they shimmered to the left of the plane, a validation barely out of reach.

But what kind of validation? The buildings were not beloved then. They were not yet a wounding and unfathomable absence in the Manhattan skyline. If they were considered temples of any kind, they were temples simply to capitalism, if not to Moloch, monolithic to their spindly bones. And yet that’s not how I saw them in the light