Stories Still in Draft Mode

The things that haunt me from 9/11, twenty years later

When I think about stories, I don’t just think about the ones that we tell. I think about the untold stories too. Sometimes, words never written are far more powerful than those we mark down.

Twenty years ago, 2,996 people woke up to live their story that was still being told. But they never finished it.

I was still a story in motion that day. A mother just becoming, two babies barely out of their first chapter. In the middle of a toxic paragraph with their father.

I’d been to New York often. I’d even lived there for a short time. And I was there, just a day before. It was as much a character in my tale as I was.

What I loved about New York was the contrast. The bigness and smallness of it. I was both infinite and finite. Grounded and free.

Tuesday was a lot like New York that day. A paradox of beauty and wickedness. Of blue skies and raining debris. Words and silence. That first sentence of the day wore a mask of ordinary and promise. And then the em dash came and we waited in the silence between words, an abrupt pause to the middle of our narrative.

When I went back the next day, the outpouring of volunteers was so massive, they turned people away. There were makeshift hospitals and prayer chains and people lined up on streets. Strangers hugged each other, simply because they walked past one another. I stayed in a hotel room in Jersey for free. The owners bought pizzas for everyone. Most of us gathered in the parking lot to sit on blankets and chairs, and we all told stories.

Stories are what connect us to each other. They are the foundation of our history, our hope, our humanity. We become who we are through the stories that we’re told, that we believe, that we read and follow. We learn, we grow, we change, we lead, we love, and most importantly, we live.

And a good story is both tragic and happy. Just like the story that started on a Tuesday 20 years ago.

Some chapters ended abruptly, in the middle of a sentence. A person who was never fully punctuated.

Others were simply epilogues, a long goodbye in 102 pages of time.

Between the bookends of two towers, and two gaping plot holes, there were heroes and villains. Tragedy and poetry. Love and loss.

As a writer, stories are my breath and words are my religion. I’ve spent years thinking about the unwritten pages of that day. Sometimes, I want to write them and give them the happily ever after they deserve. But it isn’t my story to tell.

It’s theirs. The ones whose stories are still in draft mode, forever young in their last chapters.

Related posts:

The roads came first. In the late nineteenth century Charing Cross Road and Regent Street were both constructed, defining Soho’s east and west boundaries, while Shaftesbury Avenue sliced through…