I was six and I wanted to fly.
Clutching onto innocence,
my glorious Christmas pageant angel’s wings,
guided my juvenile bones through cotton clouds,
over the endless seas formed from each heavenly raindrop,
pirouetting down into the ocean;
my feet never saying good-bye to the ground.

When I was six I wanted to fly.
Instead, one day I was ingested with images of warriors.
Warriors equipped with hellfire resistant armor,
whose bones quaked at the weight of a crashing sea of rubble,
images of hazy sidewalks with snowflake dust cloaking cars and humans,
and one image of a superhero,
his invisible wings slicing the air,
freely diving from the sky to the earth.

My young eyes never noticed above his portrait was etched,
“The Falling Man”.
I only saw the flight of a flesh toned superhero silhouetted against ivory stripes,
not the eternal leap of a man somersaulting through the atmosphere,
only to melt into the wreckage of steel.

But he was not alone.
Approximately two hundred other superheros,
danced in the saturated September breeze for a few seconds,
taking off from the smoldering inferno of office spaces,
some were flung off the ledge due to the explosion.

And I can still hear it.
The sound waves of a shot gun crackle,
an airplane spiraling into the towers as if it were a bullet splitting the skin,
of two conjoined monstrous twins who reigned over New York’s skyline.

I can feel the vibrations of my television,
radiating the pulse of the blast as though an atomic bomb,
was released in the heart of New York City,
reshaping the concrete jungle into a post-apocalyptic nest,
each steel twig crumbling as the towers collapsed.

In English class last year I revisited the superhero,
a man tumbling from the World Trade Center,
darting headfirst to the ground.
And as my mind, a jigsaw puzzle,
piecing together the mortality of this image,
I realized he was a father,
a best friend,
a cousin,
the jaded briefcase totting man you caught eyes with on the subway hours before,
a mother,
a son,
someone who planned to pick up the telephone that night and chat with her estranged sister,
a lover,
an acquaintance,
someone who contemplated treating his children for ice cream after work,
a daughter,
a dreamer constructing a better future for the ones around him,
now lost,
swept away by an infamous day,
and as much as I try to weave these words to shed a different view of 9/11,
a poem does not make that day any less horrific.
So as much as I still would love to fly,
I’m thankful that my feet,
laced in black combat boots,
are able to kiss the ground.