I’ve been crying a lot lately. A song, an image on the news, the slightest whiff of someone else’s suffering sends me into a tailspin.

In a recent therapy session, I was talking to my therapist about the anniversary of 9/11, which felt extremely heavy for me this year. I didn’t lose anyone personally that day, so I’ve always felt self-indulgent talking about how it affected me. That grief seems like it belongs more rightfully to those who lost someone.

***New York City from my office at Hearst Tower***

But being in close proximity to the attacks, then going downtown the Saturday after and seeing the fliers of all the missing, is something I’ve carried in my body all these years. It feels imprinted in me. As I get older, the understanding that I was a witness to history affects me more and more.

Living in Colorado now, the anniversary feels different than it did when I lived in New York. I feel more removed from it in some ways. Back East, it was more present. The weight of it could not be denied. It was felt.

Now, I feel that strange, sad awareness that comes with getting older: time moves on.

The world keeps spinning. A 30-year-old I meet today, a fully grown adult, can know what happened, but they can’t know what it felt like to live through it—the shock, the horror, the sense that the world had changed overnight. It seems almost impossible to me that enough time has passed for that to be true.

That’s part of what I’ve been grieving lately: not only what happened, but the passage of time itself.

A week before the anniversary, I was in Montreal with one of my closest friends, someone I’ve known for over 25 years. She lives on the East Coast, and with increasingly busy lives, we’ve learned that maintaining our friendship requires deliberately making time for each other. Once a year, we carve out a few days together to catch up and reconnect.

Spending time with a friend who has known you for over 25 years reminds you of all the people you used to be, and everything each version of you thought mattered so much. The things that consumed me in my twenties seem so small to me now: whether I was thin enough, whether a guy was going to call, why a friend was mad at me, whether I was invited to something, and what I was going to wear.

Over the weekend, my friend and I mentioned people from our past whom I hadn’t thought about in years, some I could barely remember. People whose opinions once consumed me had faded so completely from my life that I needed to be reminded they existed.

An ex-boyfriend’s sister comes to mind. I spent nearly a year wanting to impress her, causing countless arguments with my then-boyfriend because I wanted him to get to the root of why she dismissed me. The number of hours I spent agonizing over her dislike for me is maddening when I think about it now. She once took up so much real estate in my mind; now her presence is virtually extinct.

And then there are the people time doesn’t diminish.

My younger brother Ian died of pneumonia a month before my eighth birthday. More than 35 years have passed, and still, a memory of him can undo me completely. A song comes on. An image flashes through my mind. Suddenly I’m eight years old again, my body reacting as though the loss just happened, even as my mind knows decades have passed.

But the grief doesn’t feel old in those moments. It feels immediate and physical. I’ll never understand how grief can lie quiet for years and then return with such force that it feels as though no time has passed at all. I can’t make sense of where it resides in me or how and when it will want to release itself. As I get older, I’m more aware of what my body remembers, even when I’m not thinking about it. That’s part of what surprises me most: time moves on, but not everything moves with it.

The people I love are getting older. So am I. Some things I once thought would matter forever have gradually faded away. I have no idea which of the things consuming me today I’ll barely remember in 20 years and which will stay lodged somewhere inside me for the rest of my life.

Maybe that’s what all this crying has been about. How much of what we worry about eventually loses its hold on us. How little control we have over what stays and what goes. And how clearly grief can show us what matters.

I’d rather stay busy. I’d rather answer emails, make plans, worry about the things I can control and not think too hard about the things I can’t.

But the grief keeps interrupting me.

Right now, I’m paying attention.

The world keeps spinning.

What Time Takes, and What It Leaves Behind

The New Yorker 9/11 Made Me