I almost didn't do this episode. Not because I don't care, but because I wasn't sure I had the right words. And then I realized that's exactly why I needed to do it. Because none of us have the right words. We never did. And we've been trying to find them for 25 years.
So bear with me today. This one's a little different.
That Morning
Twenty-five years. A quarter century. And yet if you were alive that morning, your brain didn't file it away like a normal memory. It stamped it.
The way the sky looked. What you were eating for breakfast. What song was on the radio before someone turned it off and everything changed. The smell of coffee you never finished. The phone call that came in before you were ready for any phone call to matter that much.
Time has a way of softening most things. Rounding the edges off. Turning sharp pain into something duller and more manageable. But not that morning. That morning stays exactly the way it was. Sharp and clear and permanent.
I remember where I was. I was 19 years old, asleep on my friend's parents' couch. I had stayed the night at their house. His mother woke me up. She kept saying, "Steven, Steven, come here, come here, you gotta see this, you gotta see this."
We went to her bedroom and watched the TV. I remember seeing the smoke billowing on the first tower. I remember not being able to comprehend what was going on. And then I remember seeing the plane hit the second one.
There wasn't a doubt in my mind that this was intentional. There was never a doubt in my mind that a lot of people were dead.
I remember thinking, the way you think things in moments of shock, that this couldn't be real. That someone was going to come on and correct it. That I would wake up. That there was going to be an explanation that made it all make sense.
There wasn't. There never was.
The Question
I want to ask you something. And I mean this genuinely, not as a bit, not as a transition to something else.
Do you remember where you were?
Do you remember who told you? Was it a coworker who came in with that look on their face, the one where you knew before they even opened their mouth that something was wrong? Was it the TV in a breakroom, or a bar, or a classroom? Was it your mom calling, and you almost didn't pick up because it was early and you weren't quite ready to be awake yet?
Do you remember the first person you tried to call when the lines were jammed? That sound. That silence on the other end that was somehow louder than anything you'd ever heard. The busy signal that meant everyone, everywhere, was doing exactly what you were doing. Reaching for someone. Making sure they were still there.
I know it's heavy. I know some of you lost people that day, or knew people who did. And this isn't an easy thing to sit with. I'm not going to pretend I know what that's like. I don't. I can't.
But that memory, as heavy as it is, is also proof that you were there. That you felt it. That it landed on you the way it was supposed to land on a human being who understood what was happening, even when they didn't understand it at all.
Twenty-five years later, it still does. And I think that matters.
What Happened After
Here's the thing about that day that I don't think we talk about enough. What happened after.
Not the politics. Not the policy. Not the wars and the decisions and the debates that followed. Those are real and complicated and way above my pay grade for a podcast episode.
I mean what happened in the hours and days after. In the bars and the diners and the firehouses and the living rooms. The way strangers looked at each other differently for a while. The way people held doors open and asked if you were okay and actually meant it. The way the country, for one strange and terrible and brief moment, felt like it was full of people who understood that they needed each other.
American flags everywhere. Support, love, compassion. The country came together. The country was full of it.
I worked in hospitality for over 20 years. At that point it had only been a couple of years for me. And I can tell you that bars are strange places in moments of collective grief. People don't know where else to go. They come in alone and end up talking to strangers. They order something simple and they stay for hours, because going home means sitting with it alone. And they're not ready for that yet.
I saw that after 9/11. People coming in not because they wanted a drink, but because they needed to be somewhere with other people. Needed to hear voices. Needed to feel less alone in something that made everyone feel completely and utterly alone.
That's what bars are for, at their best. Not the entitlement and the bad tips and the stories I usually tell you about. But that. The thing underneath all of it.
Twenty-Five Years
Twenty-five years is a long time. Long enough that there are people in the world right now who weren't born yet when it happened. Who grew up learning about it in history class, the way I learned about things that felt distant and textbook and hard to make real.
And I think about what we owe them. Not a political answer. Not a packaged narrative. But the real thing. The human thing.
The truth that it wasn't just an event. It was a morning. A specific, clear, blue-sky Tuesday morning that millions of ordinary people were quietly living when everything stopped.
The truth that the people who ran toward it, the firefighters and the paramedics and the police officers and the volunteers and the strangers who just started helping because what else do you do, those people weren't heroes in some abstract, made-for-TV way. They were people. With families and mortgages and bad days and good days and all the ordinary mess of being alive. And they did something extraordinary inside of it.
The truth that grief doesn't have an expiration date. That 25 years doesn't mean you're over it. It means you've been carrying it for 25 years. And that's okay. That's allowed.
We're allowed to still feel this.
Before I Go
I said at the top I almost didn't do this episode. That I wasn't sure I had the right words.
I still don't. Nobody does.
But I think the most important thing, on a day like today, on an anniversary like this one, is just to stop. Just for a minute. Put the phone down. Turn off the noise. And remember.
Remember the people who didn't make it home that day. Remember the ones who ran in when everyone else was running out. Remember where you were and who you called and how the world felt in the days that followed, when everyone was a little bit kinder and a little bit softer and a little more aware that the person next to them was a person.
We could use a little more of that. We always could.