2001
Rhiannon is a little girl, just a month over two. She is a play by herself, hum on the potty, Elmo obsessed dollop of a girl, with blonde pigtails and wide brown eyes. I am just past my twenty fourth birthday, in an unsure place in my life, ironing my shirt in the guest room, with the only surety I have playing by my feet with found objects.
The phone rings. It is an old fashioned phone by today's standards, a black princess with a purring ringer, and a cord connected to the wall. It is my husband on the other line. My husband of only a year, one year of tumult and ships passing in the proverbial night. I turn on the television, per his command and am in time to see a second plane fly into a second tower. I sit on the bed in my bra, my wrinkled shirt forgotten. Baby Rhiannon sits, unknowing, singing to herself by my feet. My only surety, an anchor to reality.
In a month, I will be pregnant again, never questioning bringing another child into the evil, evil world.
2002
I am seven months pregnant. A month past when I would have been due with the twins I miscarried, two months before baby Morgan will grace our lives. We have left Virginia for the streets of gold promised in New York. We have passed the eerily solemn cavities with the dingy teddy bears, tattered photos and faded banners. The husband of two years works for a shoddy government project named, ironically, Homeland Security. A job he both detests and opposes. It is an agency that had profited from a horrendous tragedy, and spends as a young child would in a candy shop. He regales me with stories of the conference rooms, empty but for hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of unused equipment, forever to be left in boxes. He will leave this job in a year, and look back only as a means to justify his anger for our government, in a time when no justification is necessary.
2003
We have driven upstate and found a house on a whim, after the husband of three years has finally gotten a job. Rhiannon has graduated from pigtails to braids, preschool to pre-K, and a the bouncy baby Morgan is taking first steps, stepping toward her second year of life.
The war has been raging for two years, and our president has been swearing up and down, left and right and sideways that we are still threatened. That secret weapons are hidden in caves, that will singlehandedly send our country into Armageddon. The unity we found briefly two years ago has faded like the flags still shoved in walkways and window planters across suburbia.
We will be moving away from his job in the city, away from the aesthetically barren streets of Rockland, to go home.
2011
Fast forward to the age of Facebook. The husband of eleven years works away from home. Rhiannon is an argumentative pre-teen, trading in her braids for hair sprayed layers, no longer content to play with found objects at my feet. Baby Morgan has loaned her piercing baby blues to her young brother, and is struggling with a difficult fourth grade teacher. Baby Lucas has come onto the scene with a charming vengeance, and has begun first grade. Twins have graced our lives, and livened the rooms in our house. Osama Bid Laden has been lain in a watery grave, Saddam Hussein, whose connection to this day was slightly blurred and vague, has faced his firing squad, and his bloody remains are rarely spoken or thought of anymore.
The war still rages on, presidents have come and gone, the arguments and political nonsense have stayed the same. The anger has dimmed, and been replaced by reluctant acceptance. New fears have arisen... epidemics linked to birds, odd weather patterns in the northeast, and old squabbles being unearthed around the globe.
The firefighters and police whose lungs are now being devoured by the debris, breathed in so many years ago at "ground zero", have been turned away at the memorial. The families who were left bereft by the tragedy are not allowed closure, as the war continues and scrapes at the scars. Media still uses the indistinct threats against our safety as a ratings boost, and even the ideas to fill those long empty cavities with new life have caused controversy.
The White house will soon host a new family, tides will change, frustration will continue. The rest of the world will doubt us more, while the war robs us of money necessary to educate our young, feed our impoverished and care for our elderly. But in the age of Facebook, everyone has held onto the hope that we have solidarity once again, and that America is still a place of which to be proud.
I am sad for those who died such a violent and sudden death those many years ago. I am perpetually sad for the men and women who, in doing their jobs, were killed in front of their coworkers, while their horrified families watched on the television. Or the ones who are slowly dying now from their efforts so long ago. I am sad for the hundreds of thousands who died in another country, being punished for the sins of their religious beliefs and geography. And I am sad for all of us, who lack any control over any of these events, and whose hearts may never mend. We will spend each September 11th remembering less and less, history books will eventually have this listed as a small section of a chapter, we will continue to expand our families, change careers, make new friends, lose old ones, and grow old. But in both our hearts, and on New York ground, there will always be two dusty cavities, unfilled.
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