The 9/11 museum is one of the oddest places in the world.
It is almost unbecoming for an act of terror to be marked by so elaborate a memorial. To be recorded with such faithfulness that it hurts.
I am not sure those who built it fully understand what they have done. I am not even sure those who go there understand why they do it.
It is hard to decide if it is a bandage or a badge. If the wounds beneath are healing or meant to be preserved forever.
What is there to be salvaged from the debris of death?
Maybe love.
I am Love agnostic. There are some ideas that are best spelled with capital letters and left alone. Love, like God, is an idea too powerful to be touched with language. It slips through language because it lives despite defying meaning. Everybody uses the word as a projection of a different idea that nobody can perfectly convey.
Like water in the metaphorical world these shape shifting elements fill any mould and quench any thirst.
A professor once said in class: Just because you don’t understand it, or agree with it, does not mean you deny its power.
I felt the force of such an idea as I stood transfixed in a dark corner listening to passengers of a doomed flight leave messages for those they left behind.
It was raw and surreal. Like being unable to wake up from a terrible nightmare that you know is unreal. Except this was real. Too real.
It was a brutal thing to sit through. One by one the voices came on. A woman telling her partner she loved him. A man telling his mother he loved her. Someone else leaving the same last words for their family.
A reminder that when pushed to the end where everyday words abandon you people will call out to you in a language that they hope and pray will convey more than words.
Those who chose to call it an act of God, went down with the words “God is great.” Those who faced death chose “Love.”
Somewhere in the darkness of that day those who were lost became, like the words they spoke, something more than themselves.
