pixelated.me

I have a second milder obssession/habit:
I have always been keenly aware of anniversaries, the passage of time is something i have a deep fascination with, our/my perception of it. I notice anniversaries for all sorts of things, beyond the obvious "relationships" anniversaries. Yearly anniversaries are mainly my focus. It's been a year since i moved from new york, a year since i was last in L.A.
Acknowledging this passage of time serves to remind me of how i've changed and how that lines up with what i might have expected from the time that past. I recently turned 27 and spend a good deal of thought meditating on what this past year was for me and how that differed from what i thought might transpire.
all of this serves as a somewhat long winded intro to acknowledging that it has in fact been 6 yrs since 9-11. I was in new york city on that date in 2001. I was not near enough to ground zero to see any of the truly horrific first hand suffering that occured but i will never forget the palpable sense of loss and sorrow that filled the air that day. In the days that followed there was also a beautiful sense of commonality that bonded the citizens of new york together. There was a sense of kinship that made everyone seem accessible. I look back on those days and weeks that followed with a mixture of both awe and incredulity. In the same breath that new yorkers where helping each other the united states government was concocting the seeds for manipulating the attack to their political advantage. It breaks my heart to see how the American public has been manipulated, it breaks my heart to know that instead of growing stronger and closer in tragedy the country has had a wedge of divisiveness driven into it, it breaks my heart because at the end of the day i'm not american, but i grew up in the country, i lived, loved, and lost in new york city,
many of my closest friends live in the U.S and it's with a great sense of impotence that i watched as the political events of the country unfolded. I hope that somewhere, someone, a new yorker perhaps? remembers what it felt like to feel brotherhood with a total stranger on the streets of manhattan in the weeks after September 11th 2001.