ughhh. so okay, here it goes….

9/11 happened when i was 13, in 8th grade. and i had hit puberty just a few months prior

so i was just old enough to have hit hyperdrive on prefrontal cortical development

and as a result, i understood things much better than if it had happened just a year earlier

but an adolescent can’t fully grasp the magnitude or repercussions of an event like that

i knew it was bad, but i was going through a whirlwind of development and was wholly consumed by that

so as an adult, i knew abstractly that ~3000 americans had died in historically gruesome circumstances

but at 32, i randomly found myself thinking “but how gruesome actually, on an individual level?”

so i endeavored to go on an epic youtube spree to learn more

and oh my god

oh my fucking god

i had no fucking idea just how gruesome it truly was

like, holy shit

watching all that footage of the events, all the interviews with survivors afterwards….

it was so harrowing that it actually gave me a genuine sense of the terror they experienced

something new and visceral to complement the abstractions i had absentmindedly lived with for 19 years

i can feel it distinctly — a macabre pall that suffuses the entirety of the calamity and its pernicious aftermath

but oh god…. the individual stories

countless videos in, i stumbled upon one where a first responder told a story so unspeakably horrifying that i was like “nope, fucking nope. i’m done. fuck this“

that story is like a grand canyon of catastrophe carved into the contours of my memory. hearing it lobotomized my spirit, replacing innocence with atrocity

that was…. two days ago?

and the memory has spontaneously popped up in my thoughts at least 20 — but likely closer to 30 — times since then

i mean, i’m glad i heard that story, watched all those videos and developed a real sense of the scope and character of the tragedy

but god damn, the psychic weight of its gestalt is astounding