Five Years

First day back at school, September 2001—and every channel was running the same footage. The towers, the smoke, the collapse, looping endlessly between stretches of silence that felt wrong coming from screens that never usually went quiet. Shopping channels ran tribute graphics. Music channels dropped the ads. Everywhere, the same images.

It felt like time had stopped and accelerated simultaneously—history unfolding in real time, at a scale that made no sense against the specific smallness of a Tuesday morning. The world was briefly one thing, all watching the same screen. Then it fractured in ways we’re still living inside of.

Five years now. The images stay sharper than the feelings, which might be what memory does with things too large to hold all at once.