Paper

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
December 4, 2002

At first we thought they were birds, white ones, flying over the Site in the darkness. But the police officer said it was paper, still drifting down from the building slashed by a piece of the falling South Tower. They fall all night he said in a voice that reminded me of shooting stars and the sound of the ocean, something beautiful and amazing and which never stops.

My friend saw the paper too; it was a comfort to her as she raked for bones, something that was always there even if many of those she searched for no longer were. In the summer she cut small white squares and put them in her hair with ribbons so that when the wind blew, it looked like paper in a cloud of smoke.

I found a piece of the paper, a newspaper carrying old words away through the fire, to land scorched and new on the ground. Wings over the Atlantic say the words and I think of birds and the ocean and a plane flying low over the water seconds before it blasted this paper into the sky.

The wind whirls the dust on the anniversary day and paper is spiralled high into the air at the point in the list where the name of the friend of my friend who died at the Pentagon would have fallen. Later that day people remark what a comfort it was to see the paper blow through the dust as if the souls of the people were still there.

I think of the paper used to tell this story in words and photos and drawings, in cards and posters and flyers and books. I wonder how long it will take before all that paper would stack as high as one of the towers used to be. And I think of the note from a lost hero’s mother and the letter I sent back to her, words and paper still flying through the darkness of the Site like birds.