Today.

Today is a hard day. I know it's been a while since I've been around, and this is a dark way to return to the sparkly hallowed halls of of Get a Klew, but to not write today wouldn't be right.

I should preface by saying I'm from north Jersey. We could see the smoke from the higher hills in my area. Plenty of our parents then, and us now, worked in the city. It's only forty miles away. I didn't know what a World Trade Center was when I was ten. I just knew the Twin Towers we always spotted on the skyline. The ones we took photos in front of on the ferry. I was in 5th grade. My mother picked us up almost immediately. We had lived in Singapore for a while a few years before, and she knew what the outside world thought of America. She did not think it was over.

The day has always stuck with me. There were a few from my community we lost entirely, more who lost jobs and livelihoods in the fallout. There were none of us entirely unscathed.

I ended up writing my English thesis in college on children in 9/11 literature, inspired jointly by Jonathan Safran Foer's Extrememly Loud & Incredibly Close which had been recommended to me by my senior year English teacher in high school, and my mother's own method of reaching out to me in the aftermath of that day. Naturally, she bought me a book. Joyce Maynard's The Usual Rules was about a thirteen year old girl who lost her mother September 11th. My mother and I never talked about that day, we just went to the church services and memorials, we cooked for grieving families, and she spoke to me through a book. That was enough. There weren't words for it then, anyway.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close reopened and salved old hurts seven years later, and has not left me. My copy is underlined and written in and beloved. The story weaves the thoughts of nine-year-old Oskar Schell, who lost his father that morning, with narratives from his grandparents who survived the Dresden bombings of World War II. When I first read the novel, this section from Oskar seemed to capture how it felt to be a kid, swallowing that day.

We need much bigger pockets, I thought as I lay in bed, counting off the seven minutes that it takes a normal person to fall asleep. We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families, and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe.

Now, thirteen years later, with the world still not snuggled safely in a pocket, scary as ever, I think of this later passage from Oskar's grandmother remembering her sister, lost in Dresden, and it's the lesson I still try to learn from this day and all the others.

I had never told her how much I loved her.

She was my sister.

We slept in the same bed.

There was never a right time to say it.

It was always unnecessary.

The books in my father's shed were sighing.

The sheets were rising and falling around me with Anna's breathing.

I thought about waking her.

But it was unnecessary.

There would be other nights.

And how can you say I love you to someone you love?

I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her.

Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar.

It's always necessary.

I love you.

Whether you're reading this or not, or if we've met or not, today or any other, know I'd put you in my pocket, and I love you too. It's the best we can do.