Staring in the mirror, 9/11 sighs. Even though it's generally only once a year now that anyone cares that she exists, she knows that 25 years means something magical to people, as if numbers that end in 5 or 0 carry a mystical force when, really, it's just the nature of humans to find arbitrary significance in things that are inevitable. 25 years was going to happen, she was going to be there for it, and she knows people will want her to look her best. She works on her eyelashes.
What 9/11 hates most about these kinds of anniversaries is the willful amnesia, where names like "Bush" and "Cheney" are intoned with reverence, as if they weren't the same monsters who regularly burst into her apartment and jacked off on her and made her march around with their cum on her face, calling anyone who came to her aid a "traitor" and sent out the squamous, smirking Karl Rove to destroy them. Now, on these occasions, she gets to hear perhaps how Bush tried to unite us or maybe some kind of insulting assertion that they weren't as bad as Donald Trump. They were, she knows, she knows, and she wants to scream. They were just as bad. They used her as an excuse to try to break down the nation and the world and rebuild it in their gnarled, corrosive image, with everyone an enemy until proven otherwise. And they would make her appear regularly and dance for their pleasure. 9/11 remembers all those nights in the Oval Office, with Rumsfeld and Rice pawing each other frantically, supremely aroused by her swaying and shaking, laughing as Colin Powell tried to avoid staring at her when they stripped her and dragged her into a threesome that left her empty and lost. Cheney and Bush sucked on their cigars and laughed. They put so much heroin into her veins those days so she couldn't protest. God, it was so many foul years before they finally let her be.
She puts on her lipstick. Yes, those filthy times may be at an end for her, with many of the worst of her rapists gratifyingly, finally dead, but 9/11 knows that what they did to her and in her name was the template for what came after, for the worthless wars and the whores in conservative media, whether radio, TV, podcast, online, everywhere, making bank on tearing the citizens of the country apart, and the politicians who ride that hatred hard, like it's the fastest horse at the Derby. Without her, so much might have been different. Or maybe they would have at least found someone else to drag around and exploit.
Jesus, she thinks, at least Giuliani has become such a disgrace that no one dares to try to redefine him as some kind of benevolent, elderly statesman whose dignity is missed in false comparison to the indecent mongrels leading the nation now. And it almost makes her giggle to think of Giuliani contemplating that it is, in fact, a Muslim mayor who will lead New York City through this day, a Muslim man who is genuinely beloved and admired and who, it seems, has no interest in watching 9/11 dance.
But dance she must, even if it's only every fifth year. 9/11 has aged in the last quarter century, "but who hasn't?" she thinks. She knows her responsibilities. It moves her deeply that she is the first world event that impacted the lives of many who were children when she was forced into her current existence in fire and blood. 9/11 wishes, oh, she wishes that it wasn't the case, that she was just another day.
She checks herself out, her dark but not black dress still fitting, the slit not quite as high up on her thigh, but open enough to let her move. She can't stare too long or she'll burst into tears. She thinks about bin Laden, how he knew that they would torture and parade her and use her as an excuse for every destructive impulse they ever had. She think that it's laughably tragic that he understood the United States better than most Americans.
She's ready. Reluctant but ready. 9/11 is tired of the ritual of dancing so everyone can behold her and honor her and condemn her and mourn for her and mock her and more. She'll do it because she has no choice. For her, for 9/11, for the country where she lives, for the endless manufactured crises that may not be in her name directly but have their origin in her, it will never stop being 9/11.
