Everybody has a 9/11 birthday now.

I turned 10 the day the planes hit the World Trade Center. I was walking to art class when the news started drip dropping in the halls. My friend Griffin walked in front of me and he turned back to tell me.
I didn’t know the word. 

“Tear-ist?” I asked. Not understanding the danger of a person who would tear things apart.

“Terror-ist,” he replied. 

Our teacher quietly closing the door and turning on the news in our classroom TV, even when she’d been told not to. Another teacher, politely, calmly frantic because her twin sister worked in Manhattan. A few kids leaving school. 

My father, maybe telling me, or maybe overheard, reassuring that there was no need to worry about planes dropping on us because the suburbs of Indianapolis (or the city itself) weren’t strategically important enough.

A gaping wound in the middle of a metropolis.

Ash and ash and ash.

What had I asked for? A boombox. Stuffed animals. Books. Clothes for my American Girl Doll (she was always a good patriot).

It was an important birthday, my dad told me, because I’d be adding a digit to my age. The next time I’d do that, he said, was when I turned 100. 

What did I receive? 2,977 dead. 6,000 injured. 

In the Midwest, it meant American flags. It meant supporting the country. Our troops. Our president.

To me, it meant when people asked when my birthday was, I’d say, “September.” If pressed, “The beginning of September.”

At first – who was I to remind people? Of someone they loved or someone they know or someone who someone they knew knew dying or being maimed or being covered in ash.

And then, it felt like shame. Who was I to reclaim that day? It felt dead in my mouth.

The people who loved me (who I loved) celebrated in spite of it. Joy in the face of tragedy, and then, joy in the face of a paragraph in a history book, a waving of flags and guns on the highway, a reminder of Our Troops.

Now.

Everyone who celebrates this year. How many dead on your birthday? How many on ventilators? How many tested? How many scared?

“Oh I’m not doing much,” I say, “Quarantine and all.”

I get a new death toll for my birthday this year.

The babies born on 9/11 this year will come into the world screaming. Do they know?

What did they ask for?

What did they get? 63 terrorist attacks. A gaping wound. Ash and ash and ash. Waving flags and guns on the highway.

But remember. The children born on September 11th, 2001. They’re 19 now. They’ve had a fatality count attached since birth. I pray that they came out of the womb fighting.

We need them. I need them. I celebrate them in spite of it.