The song "7th December 1988" by Djivan Gasparyan

I spent many years not wanting to think about 9/11. I worked next door to the South Tower until the Friday before when I quit because of a growing anxiety to not be there that I will never understand. I had just moved to NYC on July 1st of that summer, 25 years old and so excited to tackle New York. I got a temp job at the American Stock Exchange where I had some friends who were also temping. Then I quit that Friday, out of nowhere, and watched the horizon burn from Bushwick on Tuesday morning as I did my shopping for my new apartment. Bits of paper and ash floated everywhere. I had forgotten to tell my parents and brother that I no longer worked there and the phones were all down; I lined up at a pay phone and reached them.

I stayed with my AmEx friends that night in Queens (all of us young and new to the city) and will never forget the dust on their clothes and the look in their eyes. I went back to work there a few weeks later (because I needed to make rent, obviously) and looked at a big hole outside my window every day for a week, until I was fired for screwing up a conference call. My New York adventure was done (although I still live here, and love it here).

I block things I don't like from my mind with amazing ease. I avoided everything 9/11 after those first few months when it was unavoidable. Who wants to think about such things? I got a job at the Social Register, another temp job -- they needed me because they had just laid off a bunch of employees after 9/11, when the economy tanked and everyone was freaking out. My main job was to peruse the obituaries in the New York Times every day, and find people who were listed in the Register so we could delete their names for the next printing. So for several months, every day, I read all the obits, which included the 9/11 people. It was a very strange time, my first year in NYC.

So I stopped thinking about 9/11 after that, and avoided movies about it, I stopped watching TV news period (the violence of the images they showed I am still disgusted by), anything like that. And then one day, about two years ago, I heard this song, and it moved me so deeply that I researched it on the Internet, and learned that Djivan Gasparyan had composed it in memory of a devastating earthquake that destroyed so many lives and families on a single day in 1988 in his beloved country. Listening to it helped me to think about 9/11, cry about it, about what I lost (I know, it's not much compared to what so many other people lost, but I did lose something that day, like most New Yorkers). It made me feel like we are never alone, no matter what, when we can connect through such beautiful, peaceful but sad music. I feel very close to God when I listed to this song, and I feel close to the composer of this song. We have something in common I think.

Megan C.