Old friends

I've spent the last 4 years intensely working on 9/11. I've lived in New York, read novels et essays, watched movies, looked at countless photographs and written conferences and a novel of my own. I don't know why this became a research object. It just did. It still is.

Whenever I go to the memorial at Ground Zero, I feel like I'm visiting old friends: names I know, without having met the people for real, make me stop and reflect. The layout of the memorial, with its two reflecting pools, reminds me of what was there, on the morning of September 11, 2001, and it is as though the two pictures, before and now, coexist.

I wanted to see it at night. The wind was particularly fierce tonight, so much so that they had shut down the north pool. It seemed fitting, since that wind was a real concern when they built the towers (they were made to sway, at the top, up to 2 meters (I think)). But then I saw the interior of the future museum: you can see the 2 tridents they saved from the wreckage. These were part of the facades of the towers, the right one on the north tower. Even like this, out of their place, they felt imposing.

Like the people I never met, like the characters I created but never were real people stuck in the towers, these tridents are old friends, that tonight I came to visit.