Etching Anniversaries

a day etched forever into the blood-stained, painful history of mankind, and i thought it an almost human obligation, to remember.

september eleventh, since the metaphysical and symbolic (of course the woefully obvious physical accounted for) collapse of the twin towers and its addendum damages at the pentagon and a pennsylvanian field, has taken on a life of its own. it became the mother of anniversaries where the hyperboles of pain, terror, evil and misery were dispensed at will and ever so readily. it became the day when evil started wearing a tudang and Machiavellian took on a Muslim middle name. this in turn evolved into a constant state of fear/suspicion, which today we still fight an unwinning war against, fuelled by a taken-for-granted-incompetent and naïvely-hegemonic bush presidency and people who are only philosophically boldened to challenge this. the inconveniences of flight check-ins are one thing but to be inconvenient with our should-be-brazen actions against a poor leadership cannot be condoned. the threat that evil might manifest itself again in the ugliest of human form is hardly a versimilitude but the threat of perpetual talk or taking actions not germane to our cause in defeating what we set out to defeat, is more potent.

why do people celebrate anniversaries? of course if they are felicitious occasions, i'm all up for it. but otherwise, it seems like a annual masochistic exercise to mentally hurt oneself into forcefully remembering that that painful day is here.

'oh this is the third year since i broke up with that thug';
'i've lost [insert formerly-adorned item] on the same day exactly one year ago';
'it's september eleventh today'.

before accusations are shot at me for being a blithe unsentimentalist, i'm all for sentiments and memories. but i guess i'm more private than most people are. we don't need the physical embodiment of this vigilanting of memories- the whole shebang is almost entirely unnecessary. i always believed that when one's at the apogee of calamitous sadness, tears do not properly enunciate the impact anymore. when one has energy to outwardly manifest this, it means the impact has not done its job. it should completely destroy you, till a point where it is almost impossible to breathe and your insides are wrecked and your mind a complete disarray that normal anatomical processes become redundant. i think that's happened to those who have lost someone at a gross tragedy as such. and combined with a complete bewilderment at something so incredibly nefarious could crash right into the human heart so effectively and with such haste, i would have thought that i, myself, would not feel more 'mere human' than this. sometimes i wonder why being humans and thus applying the common axiom of 'i'm only human', we're put through such gargantun emotions that proves so much bigger than life.

then i slap myself awake, and realise the faculties of hope, concern, spiritual anchors in the form of blind faith/religion and the ever-propounded concept of human love. as cliché as they come, these are things that make life that little bit better, and if managed properly they can indeed overcome plenty of hurdles that proved insurmountable. not forgetting they mitigate the effects of painful anniversaries. and alleviate the crumbling weight of the burden of ashes.