There was an awkward silence last Sunday morning throughout the deserted Stanford campus. Except for the flag displayed at half-staff in the White Plaza and a moving performance of Mozart‘s Requiem by Schola Cantorum at the Stanford Memorial Church, the day seemed to pass like any other. The minute of silence observed nation-wide at 8:46 EST, the time when the first plane hit the North Tower, went unnoticed as most of the West Coast was probably still asleep at the time. Overall, I had the feeling that this important anniversary was somehow understated here, where business seemed to carry on as usual. But was it?

In the soothing morning silence, I had my own personal requiem. I read again, as I have been doing on this date for the past years, Tom Junod‘s vibrant piece for Esquire on the disturbing photograph of the falling man:

The only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky — falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame — the Falling Man — became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew‘s photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory of unknown soldiers everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one simple acknowledgment.

That we have known who the Falling Man is all along.

I read his more recent (and even more disturbing) corrollary. But mostly I remembered.

I had just turned 20 at the time. I cannot remember why I was at my grandmother’s apartment (she was away from town) with my sister. We turned on the TV just a few minutes before the second plane hit the South Tower. Lucian Mândruță, an iconic figure of Romanian journalism, always fluent in his commentary and always commanding a reassuring and sobering screen presence, was presenting the special edition of Pro TV News. I remember the look on his face when he saw what we all saw, the second hit, broadcasted live by television channels all around the world.

I was not immediately as shocked by the images themselves as I was by Mândruță‘s impasse. He was at a loss for words and when he finally resumed his commentary, his voice was quivering as if he was speaking on camera for the first time. He regained his fluency shortly after, but the memory of this emotional moment stayed with me. It was as if Mândruță‘s unmistakable skid forced me to acknowledge what my eyes were refusing to believe and vicariously illuminated that the world was changing right in front of them.

I had only had a similar feeling in my childhood, when watching the Romanian Revolution broadcasted on national TV (we were not in Bucharest at the time). I remember only being able to grasp the meaning of the events unfolding on the little black-and-white screen in front of me through the dazed expression on the faces of the few adults who were also watching.

One year and a half after that unforgettable day of September 2011, I saw the same startled incredulity on the face of a woman who was returning her books to the library of the British Council in Bucharest (where I had meanwhile gotten my first full-time job) in the early morning of the first day of the invasion of Iraq, only to meet with a closed door and a temporary closure notice. The last time the Council had “temporarily” closed in Romania, at the onset of the Communist regime, it took 40 years for it to reopen.

Fortunately, this second closure lasted for only a couple of months, but the security hut and the airport-like scanning of all visitors remained to this day. The friendly BritCafé in the courtyard started to lose its customers and eventually closed and the place began to feel less and less like the relaxed cultural escape it had been during the 90s.

This is but one of the ways the 9/11 attacks took hold of my life and I cannot stop feeling their influence to this day. The terrorists succeeded not only in hitting their physical targets, but also in achieving a more perverse victory: that of forever changing the lives of Americans and of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

But if their victory was a subtle one, so is the memory of those atrocious events. It was already late last Sunday when I stopped at the gas station on Campus Drive East to get a snack. As I parked my bike outside I noticed a hand written poster that epitomized what probably most of us felt during the day: