Falling Shoes

I don't often think about 9/11. It's not that I've blocked it out, or anything as dramatic as that. It's been nearly ten years, and in the spirit of survival and not giving in, I have moved on. It's my strong belief that the collective souls of those thousands of innocents whose lives were so recklessly taken on that day would not wish us to dwell on the devastation, but, rather they'd want us to forge ahead and continue on, and in the process, we avenge their deaths by living our lives.

Occasionally, however, I do remember. I remember the way my student, Sean Lawrence, came into my classroom on the third floor of Satellite Academy on West 30th Street and said in a curious monotone, "I'm not sure, but I think I just saw a plane crash into the World Trade Center." He had caught a glimpse of that first impact, just as he was crossing Sixth Avenue, heading to school.

I recall the silence of a New York City with no cars driving past, and no planes flying overhead. It was eerie, and we, the inhabitants making our way to our homes that day, walked past each other like shadows, strangely making eye contact (not our usual way), as if to wordlessly reassure one another.

I remember the way we all shifted to the north-facing windows of the F-train, as we emerged in Brooklyn, and seeing, for the first time, the giant plume of smoke that would linger and stink for days. A teenage boy saying, "Oh my God, it's true. It's really true."

Weeks later, as we healed, I was in a bar with some friends, who introduced me to a woman I'd never met. "I was there," she said. I didn't have to ask her where. Or when. I just knew by the look in her eyes.

"There's one thing I'll never forget," she said. "The shoes."

"Shoes?"

"They just kept falling. Shoes. Women's shoes, men's boots, children's sneakers. They were raining down from the burning building."

She told me she'd heard from a scientist friend that the physics behind the falling shoes was similar to when a pedestrian is hit by a speeding car and one sees a pair of shoes standing in the exact spot where the victim once stood. Imagine that impact, times a hundred. Times a thousand.

The woman passed this image on to me, and although I'm thankful for not having been there that day, it's this second-hand image that occasionally wakes me up at night, as I consider what it must have been like to have been in those shoes on that sunny fall morning nearly ten years ago. There are other, more violent images I've seen associated with 9/11; the footage of people choosing to jump from 100 stories, rather than be burned to death, a photograph taken by my brother-in-law, one of the first responders, of something that had once been a human being -- but it's these falling shoes that I'll never forget and that will forever remind me of horrific tragedy and a loss that changed our world forever.