The Two Towers: What Fell, What Remains, What We Never Finished Grieving
Once a year, the veil thins over lower Manhattan. Two beams of light rise straight up into the dark and hold there until dawn, and something in the collective body of this nation stirs whether we name it or not. A remembering. A door left ajar on a grief we agreed, without ever quite saying so, not to finish.
I'd like to walk through that door today. Some wounds don't close by being ignored. They close by being witnessed, together, in the light.
The Waking
That morning I was in a small town in eastern New Mexico I'd never been to before, in a hotel I didn't know, scheduled for training at a car dealership I'd never visited. I remember fighting to wake up, resisting it in a way I still can't fully explain, until I finally turned on the television and understood exactly why.
The first tower had already been struck. I watched the second get struck live, the way so many of us did, utter shock and horror. Then the Pentagon. Then the crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. My mother's voice on the phone, steady in a way mine wasn't yet: this is war. I hadn't known to call it that. I was still just watching, unable to process what I was seeing into any shape my mind could form.
I never trained anyone that morning. I called the dealership as the towers fell and told them I'd come back once it made sense — once their staff could think about anything besides what was unfolding on every screen in the country. Then I waited. Flights were grounded, I was ten hours from home, and I sat alone in another state, driving to my hotel reservations and waking each morning to a version of myself I hoped might understand later, because I certainly didn't yet. I ultimately drove that rental car home myself rather than wait for a seat on a future day’s flight. Staying still had become its own kind of unbearable.
There's something else I've never quite known what to do with. In the ten to fourteen days before the attacks, I kept finding pennies. A dozen of them, maybe more, with a frequency that stopped feeling like coincidence and started feeling like insistence. I thought something was coming — I even wrote that in my journal. I certainly never imagined anything at that scale. I just felt a pull at my attention, a low hum I couldn't name. I understand it now as my own guidance trying to wake me before the world did it for me. I don't share this as any claim to have foreseen what happened. I share it because I think a lot of us carry small, strange proof like this — evidence that some part of us is always listening for what we would all experience together.
We will never forget, if we choose to really remember
What Fell, and What Fell Inside Us
Two towers came down that morning, and something else came down with them that's never been fully rebuilt. Call it trust. Call it a kind of national innocence we didn't know we still had until it was gone. We'd never been struck like that on our own soil, in the heart of what we believed made us safe. And in the twenty-five years since, that unmooring has grown into something larger and quieter — a persistent distrust running underneath so much of what's fractured us, a wariness we rarely trace back to its actual origin, though I believe, if we're honest, it starts right here.
That's the part I don't think we've ever properly grieved. Not the towers themselves — those were mourned, publicly and rightly along with the citizens and first responders, almost immediately. I mean the interior architecture. The towers within us. The part of the American psyche that had never been asked to hold an attack like that, and buckled under a weight it wasn't built for, and that we've been quietly patching ever since without calling it what it is: an unfinished reckoning. A grief we all shared and never actually sat with together — not past the anniversaries and the flags and the brief, aching unity of that first September, which I still miss more than I know how to say. For a a week or two we were something rare — a nation that had briefly forgotten to be divided. I come back to that memory every year around this time, half in mourning and half in a strange, complicated fondness for how unified we managed, briefly, to be.
The Tower Card, and the Towers We're Still Rebuilding
If you know tarot, you know the Tower — lightning splitting a structure at its foundation, figures falling from a height they thought was permanent, fire pouring from windows never built to hold it. People falling. It's one of the most feared cards in the deck, and one of the most honest. The Tower doesn't punish. It corrects. It topples what was already unstable, built on a foundation that couldn't have held forever no matter how solid it looked from the ground. It's devastating precisely because it's necessary — because some structures can't be gently dismantled, only broken open, so something truer can eventually stand where they stood.
I've come to think of the Two Towers the same way. Not as senseless devastation alone, though it was devastating and I'll never soften that. But as a rupture that also revealed — the way lightning reveals, briefly and violently, a landscape you couldn't see in the dark. It showed us the lie of our disconnection, right before we let ourselves reconnect and then sadly forget again. It showed us the towers we'd quietly built inside ourselves too — certainty, safety, this couldn't happen here — and it showed us, in the worst way imaginable, that those towers were never as permanent as we needed them to be.
Twin beams of light still rise above lower Manhattan every September, standing exactly where the towers stood, reaching a height the buildings themselves can no longer claim. There's something almost otherworldly in that image — an absence turned into something you can see from miles away. It might be the closest thing I know to what real grief looks like once it's finally given room: not the structure rebuilt exactly as it was, but something new standing in its place, reaching even higher, made of nothing but memory and light.
We're still standing in the wreckage of towers that fell inside us that day — some visible, most not. Maybe the deepest lesson still waiting inside September 11th isn't a single insight but an invitation, offered every year at the same hour, in the same light: to finally look at what fell, fully, together, and let it teach us — the way the Tower always eventually does — not just what collapsed, but what we're still capable of building where it stood.