It's raining

September 11th falls on a Tuesday again this year. It's not a clear day; it’s raining. These are the details we recount from that day as if to prove to ourselves of our continued connection as actors, witnesses and heirs to this event, which must continue to hold meaning. It is a public show attempting to thwart the inevitable failure of memory. It isn’t enough to do so privately:

We’d be thrown back into what they now knew to be the weightless irrelevance of [our] personal affairs, once more separated from ‘the world of reality’ and an épaisseur triste, the ‘sad opaqueness’ of a private life centered about nothing but itself. (Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, Preface)

Here, Arendt refers to the gap between past and future, using the French Resistance as example of the failure to pass down the knowledge experienced during anomalous and violent ruptures in history, when men struggle against tyranny and behold what they understand to be a vision of freedom.

The treasure was lost not because of historical circumstances and the adversity of reality but because no tradition had foreseen its appearance or its reality because no testament had willed it for the future. (Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future)

We watched them reading the names on television. This year DH didn't go down there, the scar in lower Manhattan. They're all gone now, and it's time to move on, he said.

I observed him in the dark hours of that morning. His body—beautiful in sleep, stripped bare of consciousness—betrayed a nearly imperceptible yet significant shift. As I clung to him, as I had done so many times before, I knew that this momentary comfort was merely an apparition of any real feeling that had existed between us.

I imagine that for him, losing one in a long list of lovers is laughably insignificant by comparison. He’s sad, he said. Sad about us.

I guess I’m sad, too. Wolper calls it grieving, which conjures to the mind the phrase: “He’s dead to me.” This seems overly dramatic, but not necessarily inapt. There is no more us—only a him and a me, both ghosts to one another. We have a past, but no vitality, no going forward. We’re all done now, and it’s time to move on, perhaps.