Seven Years Since September 11th in New York City

When the Twin Towers came down, I was in Queens, having spent the night at my then boyfriend's house. I overslept, missed the alarm and was late for a dentist appointment. When I went outside to the corner bakery to buy coffee, I saw a vast, black cloud in the bright, blue sky of lower Manhattan, and thought it was one of those freaky weather patterns you sometimes get up here, and I muttered to myself that I was glad I wasn't flying that day. I was a student pilot at the time.

Of course, it wasn't a weather pattern, but what happened that day is something I, and many New Yorkers, seem to refer to as "the new weather." Where you were on that date or how the city has changed comes up randomly in conversations. When you want to talk about something serious and you don't know what, you talk about that.

Part of it is, of course, that everyone has a story. There's my friend who moved here a week before it happened, and my partner who moved here years later. There's me and all my native New Yorker friends who know how old we were when the Towers first went up (I was one) and remember childhood visits there with our parents or with school. There's the way we hated the buildings, which seemed ugly when they still existed, and the way we relied on them for navigation. I've lived here my whole life, but I still find it nearly impossible to find my way around downtown without them there to help me orient myself.

A few people I know got scared, but mostly not. One couple moved away, "for the kids," and I know a woman who refuses to be underground in the subway system at Times Square, convinced that's what will be attacked next. Mostly, though, we live in New York, a place where things happen and the landscape of buildings and memory is always changing.

The human mind is designed to forget pain. And so it is that our lives here, which looked like a movie war zone for weeks seven years ago, seem normal, seem, largely, like this thing never happened to us. But sometimes we'll stop and remember, not that it did -- we could never forget that -- but how it did -- what it felt like and what it smelled like. When we start getting the cool breezes and bright blue skies that come in late August and early September after hurricanes farther south, many of us can't help but refer to it as "World Trade Center weather." It's not hyperbole. It really was the most beautiful day ever when people left their houses that morning.

It is in politics that New York seems the most wounded still. It's advantageous to too many people to talk about our wounds and our risks. The yearly exploitation of my city, usually by politicians who cheerfully reviled it until history fell down upon it, enrages me. In an election year, it is, of course, worse.

I live in New York City not just because I was born here and not just because I like it and not just because it is one of the few cities in the world where I can pursue a serious career in the arts. I live in New York because it provides me freedom, and choice and history. When politicians who ignore history, who oppose choice, who would argue that my life is less valid than someone else's because my partner and I are of the same sex, talk about 9/11 to elicit support and entice their followers to believe in the failed militarism of the last seven years that by and large hasn't even been about combating terrorism, despite what they say, I'm sickened. It's a slap in my face.

So we're fine. We're safe. And even if we're no longer the greatest city in the world, even if this is the fall of Rome, even if we now define the weather by a day buildings came down and people died, this is still my home. And I'm not scared of the admittedly grim possibilities of history yet written, so much as I am scared of politicians who would use this place that I love to hurt us all more than we've already been hurt.

The last time I went to the Twin Towers was on Christmas Eve the year before they came down. I was with a casual acquaintance and, lacking anything better to do after family celebrations, we went swing dancing at Windows on the World with a bunch of French tourists who asked us what we thought were silly questions about our lives as New Yorkers. But they got one of the last records of our lives Before All This Happened, before the new weather, and the terrible thing that sometimes almost feels forgotten, but that we still have to talk about every single day, because that's what New York City is now, as much as the subways, some buildings that once were.