Last night as we were getting ready for bed, Alex asked if he could look through my India pictures. “I like learning about who you were before we were together,” he said. That was the first time I could remember him asking to see them and easily the first time either of us had looked at them in three years. We sat on the futon and I showed him the Taj Mahal and my apartment in Delhi and the mighty Ganges.
“This is Jaipur,” I said, “I went here my second weekend in India. I can remember that because it was the weekend after September 11th.”
“So,” he said, “you were here exactly eight years ago.”
September, and those dual milestones, snuck up on me this year. But for some reason, being reminded of it in that way last night made the significance of the anniversary stick with me more today than usual.
Most times, I’m so focused on trying to remember September 11th the way that most of my friends and family seem to that I forget my own, personal memories of fear, grief and anger. Looking through my India pictures made my personal memories much more real.
The India memory that has stuck with me the most today was something that one of my housemates in Delhi said as we were watching the planes fly into the towers. She had immigrated to the US from Northern Ireland and at one point that night said to us “This is so awful. I moved from Northern Ireland to get away from this. Now we’re going to have this fear with us everywhere we go.”
I didn’t realize what she meant at the time, but in the coming months and years, I would think of her words when I rode an airplane or had to get my bag checked to enter an ammusement park. I thought of her words again when I went to Northern Ireland five years later and saw how the people there are so defiantly trying to overcome that same lingering fear. I hope that they (and we) will find that while perhaps nothing can give us back our innocence that doesn’t have to mean that we’re doomed to an eternity of fearfulness.
The Cure At Troy
By: Seamus Heaney
Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted or endured.
The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home.
History says, Don’t hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.
Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.
No comments:
Post a Comment