Though my heart beat fast, I was filled with an uncanny void as I scurried through space that was once home to the twin towers. It has been a few years since I last visited the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in New York. I only remember fragments of the visit, a dilapidated pillar that once joined other cemented structures in taking the weight of the magnificent building, a quote across a wall beside a staircase that once led many survivors to safety, a wristwatch that once belonged to one of the many that we mourn today.
It doesn't take time for my body to sense the emotions the memorial left me when I mentally revisit those fragments.
I remember tears rolling down my eyes as I sat in a room, glancing at a father's ring, carefully placed in a closeted glass. I looked at it as I heard his daughter reminisce about her memorable time with him around. It reminded me of my grandfather's shawl, and his memories engulfed me. I remember feeling a sense of suffocation, I wanted to cry out loud. I stepped outside to the twin waterfalls and sighed, I cried as I took a walk around the parapets, reading names of those who were killed as they glistened under the sun's rays.
The 9/11 Memorial & Museum exists in duality as a public space while being a dignified space of remembrance, allowing one to extend a visit into an experience. It left me pondering over the attack, over the history of the United States and over my own relationship with longing and grief, long after the visit.
It was one of the few public spaces, where I felt I could be vulnerable, for it allowed room to experience the past and present and connect them in a way that did not make the onlooker feel like the other, the outsider, the glancer, but rather a part of it.