September 11th, 2011

Never Forget. As if we could.

The date was September 11th, 2001. The time, about 7 in the morning in China, almost 12 hours after the planes brought down the World Trade Center.

I remember how I watched the planes crash into the skyscrapers, smoke roiling around the seemingly invulnerable structures into the sky, and then, the buildings silently disappearing behind the thick cloud of smoke and dust, never to reappear again. I don’t think I felt anything then. It was like watching a TV show about a country and place that I’ve only seen on postcards and heard told in stories. So from across the world, without understanding of the impact or even the magnitude of the attack, I watched.

Three years later, I moved to the United States. Between then and now, I’ve lived in Edgewater and North Bergen in New Jersey, Forest Hills and Clinton Hills in New York, went to school in Jamaica Estate, the Bronx and then Brooklyn, visited the Statue of Liberty, but until two days ago, I had never even gone near Ground Zero.

It wasn’t that I was avoiding the site on purpose, it was more that I simply hadn’t crossed paths with it. There was never really a cause during the 7 years that I was in the States for me to visit Ground Zero, so I didn’t.

So what caused me to finally visit Ground Zero on the 10th Anniversary of 9/11? I’m still not sure. Maybe it’s just the perfect combination of time and place (I had been shooting the Lela Rose show for UPTOWN Magazine for Fashion Week, so I was only a handful of subway stops away). But I’m glad that I finally visited Ground Zero. Here are the few pictures that I got from the visit.