DAY 911 | Never Forget

Melancholy breakfast

blue overhead blue underneath

the silent egg thinks

and the toaster's electrical

 ear waits

the stars are in

"that cloud is hid"

the elements of disbelief are

 very strong in the morning

— Frank O'Hara, Melancholy Breakfast, Stones, 1958

The Day the World Stood Still

Where were YOU on 9/11?

I was depositing a check at my bank, near Gare Montparnasse, in Paris. My BF called me to tell me that a "small" plane had crashed into one of the WTC towers. I couldn't check the info online because phones had no Internet access in those days (at least mine). When I got home in Levallois two hours later, an impossible view of the Twin Towers engulfed in a raging inferno and billowing smoke was splashed all over the TV screen. We sat down on the couch, both speechless and mesmerized.

Never Forget. Never Forgive.

The Jumpers

They began jumping not long after the first plane hit the North Tower, not long after the fire started. They kept jumping until the tower fell. They jumped through windows already broken and then, later, through windows they broke themselves. They jumped to escape the smoke and the fire; they jumped when the ceilings fell and the floors collapsed; they jumped just to breathe once more before they died. They jumped continually, from all four sides of the building, and from all floors above and around the building's fatal wound. They jumped from the offices of Marsh & McLennan, the insurance company; from the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond-trading company; from Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors—the top. For more than an hour and a half, they streamed from the building, one after another, consecutively rather than en masse, as if each individual required the sight of another individual jumping before mustering the courage to jump himself or herself. One photograph, taken at a distance, shows people jumping in perfect sequence, like parachutists, forming an arc composed of three plummeting people, evenly spaced. Indeed, there were reports that some tried parachuting, before the force generated by their fall ripped the drapes, the tablecloths, the desperately gathered fabric, from their hands. They were all, obviously, very much alive on their way down, and their way down lasted an approximate count of ten seconds. They were all, obviously, not just killed when they landed but destroyed, in body though not, one prays, in soul. One hit a fireman on the ground and killed him; the fireman's body was anointed by Father Mychal Judge, whose own death, shortly thereafter, was embraced as an example of martyrdom after the photograph—the redemptive tableau—of firefighters carrying his body from the rubble made its way around the world. 

Source: Esquire, Tom Junod, September 9, 2021

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