"Never Forget"

Every year around this time, people always bandy about the phrase "Never Forget."

"Never forget," they say with wistful sadness or a steely undercurrent of yet-unresolved anger. "Never Forget" gets emblazoned across pictures of flags and rubble. Never forget, the news people tell us.

I always want to ask everyone that says this what they remember. What is it you are not forgetting? Do you know? Can you tell me?

These are the things I will never forget:

I will never forget watching people jump from impossibly high windows on a grainy-screened tube television in my high school history class. We took turns holding the antenna out the window of the steel-reinforced building to get a signal strong enough to see anything more than snow.

I will never forget being at work that evening, the two cops that walked in to my corner drugstore, just to buy water, and the way everyone made space for them, the way everyone looked at them out of the corners of their eyes, until the cops stood in front of the registers and announced to the store that everything was okay, they were just buying water.

I will never forget this picture.

But most of all, what I will never forget is a young man I knew a year later, when I went off to college, a fancy liberal arts college that I did not graduate from. I was deeply unhappy there for a long laundry list of reasons, and I was an insomniac. I couldn't sleep at night, only during the day, when I had other things to be doing.

This young man, he was also an insomniac. He couldn't sleep. So we took to hanging out, in the wee hours of the morning, when even the hardest partiers had passed out. The two of us, sitting in his room, smoking joint after joint, stereo on so low we could barely hear it, lying together in his bed staring at the ceiling, only touching incidentally.

It was comforting to be with someone else during those hours. So we were together.

Once, I asked him why he couldn't sleep. It was probably 5 am. We were both tired. The sun was due to come up soon; it was almost time for us to separate and sleep what little we could. This is what he told me.

"I'm from New York City," he said. "I'm from Manhattan. And I slept through 9/11. The whole thing. I didn't wake up until after midnight, until 9/12. I feel like I haven't slept since. I can't. What if it happens again."

I will never forget this young man, irrationally convinced his sleep had caused the world to fall apart around him. I wonder how many others there are, like him. I will never forget the pit that opened up in my stomach when I realized what kind of darkness he was stuck in, and that I had no way to help him, other than to keep sitting with him, there in his room, when the rest of the world was asleep, and neither of us could.