No pictures.

I don’t have much to say about today. I think that most of what I would say, should I decide to say it, has already been said a hundred times over since that fateful Tuesday, the Tuesday when I was 14, when the world changed.

It’s strange to think back though, to sitting in front of the television screen excactly ten years ago, to feeling myself grow up in an instant as pictures paraded before my eyes and hating it before I even knew what had happened. A piece of my childhood vanished that day, but in many ways, I was still a child. I didn’t see the big picture, perhaps because I couldn’t. It was too big, too shocking. I reduced it to my terms, and in days that followed, I would selfishly lament my almost-departure to France September 12th, wish that my flight hadn’t been cancelled and I could have escaped from the ghost town that was my birthplace of Manhattan so that I wouldn’t have to witness the strange silence that had enveloped it.

But I didn’t get to escape, not until the end of the month, which meant that I watched as Manhattan changed in what felt like an instant. We tried to get back to normal life, but everything felt different somehow, as though we’d all come in to school on a Saturday, and no one quite knew why.

I did go to France soon after, on the foreign exchange trip I’ve mentioned here and there over the course of my five years of blogging. I watched from afar as my country tried to pick itself up and dust off its knees, listened through the then-garbled speech of French newscasters and allowed myself to pretend that because I was far away, it wasn’t really happening to me. But it wasn’t until today, as I watched the French news coverage of the New York City memorial, tears streaming down my face as I tried to cry in silence in front of the Country Boy’s family, that I really realized the grandeur, not of the events of 9/11, but of what has happened since. For better or for worse, America has changed since then, and I believe we’ve gotten stronger, in spite of and in part thanks to the humbling trials we’ve had to face.

I don’t know if I would feel this way if I were still living on that side of the Atlantic, but I do know this: the more time I spend in France, the more I love my country. It’s a faraway kind of love, the kind that starts to fade the moment I stay too long in the day-to-day, but from here, I can watch from afar, relish what I’m missing, fall in love with America and all she stands far all over again.

No pictures. No recipe. Just a little love letter to the country that made me who I am.

God Bless the U.S.A., today and forever.