Dancing with the young Americans

It has been twenty years since 9/11. I was—for just another month—nineteen then. More than half my life has been lived in the shadow, not of that grief, but of the war that battened on it, and I cannot see a way out from under it even now. The war can vote now. Could last year. The dead cast shorter shadows than the myth they were made to feed. And so like everything else in this country, they haunt us and it is not my place to mourn them, except that as part of the community of a nation I should have been asked to, and what I was asked was to wave the flag for a nationalistic fantasy instead. I lost no one to the towers, but I am losing someone to the war, and I do not want to see what happens when it is my family's candles against the next war's photo op.