They still exist, in the form of businesses and advertisements that still have the Towers in their logo or artwork. I see the Towers float through busy streets on the sides of vans and trucks.

Wanda’s Full Moon Saloon and Dining Room on 2nd Avenue has the Towers intertwined with the whole look and feel of the establishment. I wonder if they plan to change that? I don’t really care enough to go in to any of these places and ask, but I do wonder if images of the Towers will someday disappear from the landscape.

Maybe it would be premature to erase them now, since it’s possible the Towers could be rebuilt exactly as they were.

I’ve noticed that a lot of car services use the Towers in their artwork, and for some reason so do demolition companies. I can understand car services using the Manhattan skyline in their logo as a way of evoking the landscape of the city, but demolition companies? Grim irony aside, I wonder if that choice of images was a macho thing, with the demolition companies subtly suggesting “We can demolish anything.”

I don’t know what it says about me, but I still look for the Towers any time I go outside. A few months ago I was in a part of Brooklyn that I didn’t know very well, and as a reflex I looked at where they would have been and thought “Yup, that’s where they should be.”

I had mixed feelings about the Towers of Light. One of the lead artists on the project went to the college I graduated from (Oberlin College) and in fact we probably attended Oberlin at the same time.

The Towers of Light were well-intentioned, and turned out to be far more popular and successful than anyone expected. I looked for them every single night, and was genuinely sad when they went out last week.

What I found surprising was that a lot of people not from New York seemed to think that the Towers of Light were not real, but an Internet hoax of sorts perpetuated by a clever Photoshop artist.

And indeed, I’ve seen actual photographs of the lights (like this one) doctored and enhanced with image editing software such that someone might reasonably think the Towers of Light were a fantasy.

But the Towers of Light were as real as the alligator that was found in Central Park this summer (I’ve had a hard time getting folks to believe that story, but it’s true. Although it wasn’t quite an alligator.).

Aesthetically, the Twin Towers were buffoons. Standing in their shadows as I did on September 3rd (8 days before it happened) I felt like the scrawny kid in a locker room full of big burly jocks who talk trash but don’t really mean it. I remember feeling that these buildings were oppressively huge. Even when I managed to find a spot, around Battery Park City, where it was possible to get the Towers out of view, I still knew they were there, as if preparing some kind of reckoning.

Standing next to the vast emptiness that reaches eternally into the sky from the mass grave of Ground Zero, all I could think of was the people who showed up to work that day, just like I did. But their offices filled with fire. I thought of the ugliness and solitary anguish of the last minutes of those who knew they had no way out so chose to jump. I thought of the preparedness and misguided hopefulness of those who rushed to the roof of the building to wait for helicopters to come rescue them like they did in 1993. And spitting on it all are the individual faces from an alternate reality. The cult of self-obsessed pieces of shit who did this, whose tentacles of pain spread instantly like a lightning storm out from the buildings and into the houses and lives of the husbands and wives and children and boyfriends and drinking buddies and lovers of those who they murdered.

People in other states and countries dialed random (212) area code numbers to talk to whoever in Manhattan would answer, just to see if anyone was still there, and to make some connection between themselves and what we thought was the start of World War III.

Some people I worked with went to the Red Cross to give blood. I didn’t bother because I could see out the window that everyone was dead. Was I wrong, and were the others right? I don’t know, but I heard a lot of people say a lot of stupid things and I don’t think any of it was wrong.

I know I was happy to be getting to work a little early. I figured out later that the second plane flew directly over my head. I worked with a news organization at the time. While Rome burned I could not leave my desk. My only instinct was to run downtown and be there and do something. But I sat shoveling up content to a news web site that was so highly-trafficked that no one in the world could even access it.

I called my mother thinking it might be the last time I ever talked to her.

I left the office in the afternoon and waited for the skies to rain fire. I looked at the nondescript buildings on West 35th Street and thought “Is all this going to be gone soon?”

Months and months have passed, and I’m seeing now that this topic of conversation will never die. Every single New Yorker I meet from now until forever will have a story to tell. I’m also starting to see that I’ll never get tired of listening.

At one extreme I talked to someone who ran coughing and bleeding and panicking for her life from the lobby of the south tower minutes before it would have crushed her (“Nothing matters any more,” she said).

At the other extreme I talked to someone whose next door neighbor in the 6th grade knew someone whose girlfriend was supposed to report to work at the Twin Towers on September 11 (“Who did you know who was there?” she asked me, like it was a night club).

The latter individual, who is from Texas but was in Arizona on September 11th and had never been to New York before I talked to her in November, was more strident than anyone I’ve talked to about her personal connection to the attacks.

I don’t think or mean to imply that I think her feelings are illegitimate. There were no right or wrong reactions.

There are what I guess you could call middle extremes. Some are at peace with the idea that it was a one-off perpetrated by a cult group from the desert, not worthy of any further concern, just get over it, but could someone please sweep up the mountain and build new Towers.

Will there be new Towers? Will all those businesses still using the Twin Towers in their logos finally change? Will there be 40 Towers? 300?

September 12th, September 13th, September 14th… I made every effort I could to avoid talking to people about it in the days and weeks after it happened. I specifically avoided men. I have no tolerance for anecdote-informed ravings of instant experts who suddenly went from being barroom or chat-room blowholes to university professors of mideast politics.

Inevitably, I got cornered by people, all of them men, who aggressively shared their wisdom about the most obtuse and at times invented pieces of information regarding the hijackers and the organization that planned the attacks. It really made my head hurt.

I have lost count of the number of diners and book stores and CD stores in this town that have gone out of business only to be replaced, seemingly instantly, by some completely different business. I walked into a Gap once and asked if there used to be a diner in that place, and no one knew. They just worked there, didn’t know the neighborhood, etc.

Sometimes I think New York is a city without ghosts, and without memories of those who have gone before. I imagine they’ll replace the Twin Towers with a couple of delis and a Barnes & Noble. People will come downtown and ask “Were there a couple of enormous towers here?” and no one will remember.