A small, personal tribute to the Twin Towers. Written on the 13th of September of 2001; dedicated to those who sadly lost much more than I did.

[Note added March 18th, 2003: World events, although irrevocably influenced by Sep. 11th 2001, have now overtaken it. I believe the war in Iraq is quite likely, in the short term, to destroy more civilian lives than Sep. 11th did. I also believe that its aftershocks are likely to be much bigger than Sep. 11th was. Despite such potentially bigger events, I have chosen to leave this piece of writing about the Twin Towers, untouched, on this web page. It is a record of thoughts and feelings at a particular point in time: the night of Sep. 13th, 2001.]

I was about 11 years old, I think, when, without warning, cranes and bulldozers were brought in one day to tear the big palm trees down. It was on Avenida Cuauhtemoc, the avenue we lived on in Mexico City. It had a broad central divider with big beautiful palm trees running up and down its middle. Night had just fallen, and my family and I were returning from a big extended family dinner. I remember we were riding in my dad's old car, a grey Mercedes with soft interiors that we were curiously fond of. With its old 60s-style body shape, and quaint speedometer (a clever little rolling cloth arrangement that rose vertically like a needle, and which turned crimson at speeds above 40 miles an hour, so as to remind drivers of the dangers of traveling at such rash speeds), the car was a symbol of my father: a little antiquated, perhaps, but built of straight and solid principle.

We arrived home that night to find the avenue lit by powerful white electric lights, shining on the big palm trees. These trees were not the tall thin palm trees that you sometimes see in movies or find in Los Angeles. Oh no, these were thick, gorgeous monsters, firmly rooted in the ground. I don't know their name, and I have rarely seen them again. But they were enormous, and strong as rocks. I remember that three or four children, standing with our arms outstretched and with our fingertips touching each others' fingertips, could barely encircle the broad girth of the base of the trees. During the daytime, the palm trees dominated the avenue, with their thick brown trunks rising tall and strong, and their big frothy branches splaying out like enormous umbrellas from the top of each trunk.

That night, in my memory, taut steel cables had been lashed from the cranes to the top of each tree. Standing a little bit away from the tree, the hydraulics on the cranes would whine up, and the cables would be pulled sharp, strong and deadly, crackling with tension. Arriving to see this, we got out of the car in silence and astonishment. My parents, angry, went to talk to the workers. What was going on? What on earth were they doing?? How could they even think of doing such a horrible thing?? Later, I learnt that they were making way for a thoroughfare. But I don't know what they told my parents then. What could it have been: most likely, that those were their instructions, and that that's the way it was going to be. What I do know is that the work continued, and with the sound of deep ground being eviscerated, the sound of a thousand roots snapping, those huge, immovable palm trees, the pillars and rocks of our street, were brought crashing down.

Many years later, for various reasons I still don't really understand, I decided to make my home in a city of the North. This city is a difficult one, famously hostile; it is an uncomfortable and, most often, an unhappy city. But oh, how alive it is. I didn't arrive alone, I came together with someone. But as it turned out, although we love and care for each other, neither she nor I knew at the time that, in fact, we had each arrived alone. Some fifteen months after arriving, I found myself truly alone, and it was then that I began the slow and difficult work of trying to put down some small roots here, the work of slowly starting to turn my relationship with this city into something that would make it feel like my own home. I imagined this would be work that would take years, the fruits of which might be to eventually, finally, get to call this place truly "mine."

I had been in the city before, when I was younger. With my friend Alejandro I had gone to the top of some famous towers, among the tallest in the world. The towers were not pretty. But they were extraordinary feats of engineering, marvels of strength and imagination. Slim, silver-colored beams of steel, as long as the buildings were tall, ran up the facades of the buildings. There were many of these beams, perhaps 30 or so on a side, standing side by side in a symphony of support. Each beam went straight up, vertical and uninterrupted, all the way from the ground to the highest floor: silver highways stretching from the earth to the sky. I don't remember who thought of it, whether it was Alejandro's idea or mine, but when we were at the base of the towers we went to stand right up against them, and with our bellies pressed against the beams and our chins resting on their shiny metal, we looked straight up, our eyes following the beams to the dizzy top, where silver joined blue. Many other tourists must have stood and looked up like that. And, like many other tourists, I don't think our sense of sight managed to comprehend the immensity of what we were seeing. But somehow, I think that our bellies and our hearts did understand. That feeling of vast solidity, of a huge yet soaring immobility, is something I will never forget.

As you all know, geopolitical movements of our century and the century we just left behind led some to decide that the world would be better off without these towers. They also decided that any means would be justified in achieving this goal. As you also all know, they achieved their goal, with such complete and resounding success that one asks oneself whether they themselves imagined the scale of the destruction that they would cause, the scathing thoroughness with which the towers would be eliminated. The towers were completely and entirely demolished, the silvery beams twisting, burning, writhing, and eventually breaking, until both towers were reduced to mounds of rubble, grotesque giant sculptures of painfully twisted metal, vast suffocating presses of concrete and steel within which thousands of terrified lives were suddenly squeezed out. Where the imagination once soared upwards, where two young mexicans one morning happened to put chins against metal and eyes to the sky, there is now nothing more than a horrendous giant hole, a pit of burning death and destruction.

I did not myself lose any of my immediate loved ones in that hellish 11th of September. But, like many others here, I walk today with gaping holes inside me.

The palm trees have been ripped out; the towers, ripped apart; and the roots, mauled and twisted forever.

I am a New Yorker.