"911 A Year Later: Reflections on the Past" Personal Page by zentrinko

This expression I wrote after the intial feelings of terrible shock had subsided, and the fury against whoever perpetrated the crimes has began:

"The strong sense of horror, or disbelief, of unreality, a choking sense of vague ramifications that touched nothing of the immediate sorrow and did absolutely nothing to quiet the silent internal scream that still could not empathically match the thousand voices that cried out at once and were forever silenced.
What terror felt the hijacked riders unknowingly flying to their doom and their immortality?
What thoughts had those who, on a fine late summer morning, looked up from busy sidewalks, whose eyes widened great in paling faces...who ran and hid as seemingly all the fires of hell and its ashes rained down, twisted metals and limbs of the dead falling with impacts that would shake the world's foundations.....
What single roar of determination was heard from a hundred throats to enter and rescue all those that could be saved, yet of those many perished themselves found later heroically crushed in a last instinctive attempt to protect their fellows from the inevitable....
What spirits of those nameless heros whom though blind themselves led souls they did not even know but were forevermore connected in tragedy and hope, back to the world and breath and life....
.....Nothing I could do or feel could match those emotions.

So many stood around the world almost breathless in deficient comprehension of the enormity of this evil act. Some cried and hid their faces fearing the beginning of the end had come, and then some, like I, stood motionless, body gone totally numb watching the fireballs and the collapse. In those violent moments I felt as if the floor dropped away from beneath my feet, as if my legs with their tingling chill, could no longer support me, and I did not know until much later tears had wet my face, had fallen copiously to darken my shirtfront as I had been borne along with those souls who shared the terrible common moment of departure from this world. The anguish and terror in their last breaths, as they watched, remembered, said goodbyes to loved ones in person or in their hearts, as those in the buildings and on the ground, some not even knowing it was their last seconds, had draw their final breaths, smiled their final smiles, screamed their last scream before they were engulfed.

Days I walked in an empty pain while that place in my soul reserved for this tragedy alone, roiled with dark emotions, yet nothing compared to those who lost personally, lost closely, those who each day of their lives must look up to that now empty skyline and lament the senselessness of it all but who still had to go on with life and living. My loss was the loss of the world, for this moment in time where humans had yet again pitted infinite evil and fanatical misdirection against those who naturally shone bright with heroism and nobel sacrifice.

A year later again I stood with chill and heat alternatively shaking my body though standing in a temperate and calm clime. In a pleasantly rustic house of a far country I still felt the hot winds blowing at Ground Zero, still I felt and tasted the bitterly pale dust drying lips and throats..misting eyes---invisibly I stood beside those come to mourn and remember. I took their hands in mine, and with voiceless prayers and wishes I launched forth everything in me that could help sustain them and any around the world who empathised, sympathised, mourned, grieved, and who had made up in their hearts that they would work and be party for no such evil. Surely, if such a great heartfelt love, hope and determination was sent forth and made into reality by a million million peoples, surely such fierce resolution in the face of enmity, such oneness in purpose could stir the sluggish tides of the world's ocean of people to make this a better Earth for all." --Sept. 11, 2002