We were sleeping.  I was still married, T worked nights, we slept late into the morning.  There was a knock at the door, the man here to do the annual termite inspection.  He said, offhandedly, "You hear about the plane that crashed into the World Trade Center?"  I hadn't.  He was so casual, I thought it must be a small aircraft, a little Cesna or something.  I turned on the news.  Woke T up.  Called family.  Called friends.  Cried.  Cried more.  Watched them fall.  Spent days stunned, trying to grasp the enormity of what had happened, even as I thought about how it was, in some places, an almost every day occurrence.

Somewhere, I still have a VHS recording of it...some day I may watch it, or maybe I will just destroy it.

The days following, so eerily quiet, the sky empty of everything that nature hadn't put there.

Oh, how I cried.  So many lives gone, so much more than mere buildings destroyed.

In the months following I railed against the Homeland Security act and everything that accompanied it - passing those laws stole away a large measure of our freedom, the freedom so reviled by the people attacking us.

The victims - the people inside those buildings just going to work, going about their day, trying to pay the bills and save up for a vacation, retirement, paying off the house or the car, living out their military careers...the passengers who spent Goddess knows how long thinking about their end, knowing they were doomed, wishing for one last opportunity to kiss someone goodbye, to hold them close, to whisper "I love you" before boarding, regretting angry words or what they'd left undone...

The heroes - the people who, against all instinct, against all sense, went IN to save others, to help them out and down and through, to rescue strangers at the risk and eventually cost of their own lives...the people on the one aircraft that didn't make its target, who chose to shape their end THEIR way rather than let strangers use them to kill others...

They have names.  They have faces.  They have left behind children, spouses, partners, pets, homes, cherished memories, gaping holes of used-to-be-them.

There are conspiracy theories.  There are claims that our own government did this, or that there were no aircraft, or that the aircraft were empty, or...or...or...

I believe that three building fell in New York City, that the Pentagon was hit hard, and that a bucolic field will never, quite, be the same.  I believe that people died who, under normal circumstances, would have lived out the day and continued on Life's path.

I believe that we honor the dead by living, not by allowing fear and hatred to win.  I'm alive.  I remember.