L'America che ora conosco

Bells will toll and sirens will sound and tears will make their way down the faces of those whose family members were on the planes and in the buildings and on the streets on that fateful, unforgettable day…
The dead will be remembered and the heroes will be honored and presidents and mayors and many more people, big both in stature and in heart, will lay wreaths and extend sincere expressions of gratitude to the men and women who selflessly dug in to rescue and recover and clean and console…
Many will recall how clear and blue and perfect—so perfect—were the skies, and how frighteningly awful was the juxtaposition of a landscape of bodies and crumbled buildings and the film of light gray soot against the most beautiful skyline in the world…
A million someones will speak of the smell… and the fear… the dead phones… the sight of a mass of shell-shocked bodies, drifting Zombie-style over the Brooklyn Bridge…the tattered pictures of the missing hanging precariously off walls from South Street Seaport to Harlem—words begging, pleading for information on the whereabouts of the subjects of those pictures, months after it was clear they were gone from here…
Low flying planes will still shake the senses… former frequent flyers still will suck on valium to make it from one airport to the other without breaking down… we’ll all take off our shoes and toss our water and submit to pat downs and walk through x-ray machines, not-so-subtle reminders of how terrorists, threatened by our way of life, forever changed them…
And at 8:46 a.m. and 9:03 a.m. and 9:37 a.m. and 10:03 a.m.—the times that mark the impacts of the four planes—there will be silence.
Peace be still.