Yesterday I saw Ground Zero for the first time.
I guess I'd probably caught a glimpse of it twice before: once driving past to get to the West Side Highway, and once in October 2001 when the ferry line passed nearby (you could still see the smoldering pile of debris and twisted steel silhouetted in the morning light, even from the river). But I'd never seen it up close. At least not since it became Ground Zero. I do have a very vivid memory of walking up from the river, through the World Financial Center, over the pedestrian bridge, and past the towers in June of 2001. I remember thinking about stopping for sushi for lunch and decided against it for the moment. I have a very specific memory of thinking to myself, "That's ok, I can always come back."
But I hadn't been back. I'm not entirely sure why; it just never came up, I guess. Whenever I went to the city I'd always had other things to do.
But they've recently reopened the World Trade Center PATH train line, and since I was headed to lower Manhattan it made sense to take it. I'd not realized before, however, that the train line actually enters Ground Zero. (I knew that it used enter the World Trade Center area, but I didn't know that it still did after it was reopened.) Most of the time there's nothing to see out the windows of the train - it's underground or underwater - so I was startled when all of a sudden it pulled around the corner and out into daylight, and suddenly I could see out the window that we were in the wide open pits where the buildings had once stood.
I made myself a little late to my lunch appointment because I felt I had to look around. Everything now is so cleaned up it almost looks like nothing's wrong. And I think for visitors who had never been there when the towers were standing it's hard for them to really grasp what was lost. But I can tell. I stood there on the eastern side, looking back towards the World Financial Center buildings I'd walked past on that sunny day in June, and I could see them perfectly clearly. Yet I knew I wasn't supposed to - I never had been able to see them from this vantage before, and something was very wrong that now I could.