Everyone knows what happened five years ago today.

This is what you might not know what happened and why, despite the horror of today, I’ll always hold the memories of today in a special corner of my heart. I wrote about it a little bit last year, about how I drove down to New Haven to pick up a battered Josh, dusty from the remains of the World Trade Center, who had fled New York City after being awakened by a plane crashing into the building where he’d recently bought books for class. I remember him telling me that he thought it was a thunderstorm, so he’d jumped out of bed and unplugged everything, before he realized it was clear out. He lived three blocks away from the towers.

I, on the other hand, was safe in my suburb in Connecticut, worried like hell about Josh, who’d just the weekend before spent the weekend with me.

Today, the world stops momentarily to remember the deceased on September 11th. On the internet are stories upon stories of people who died, people who lived, people who have disappeared since that fateful day in 2001. How dare we only stop on September 11th, I want to shout out. Every time I look at Josh and see Matthew, who wasn’t even a glimmer in our eyes back in 2001, I think of how fucking close I was to not having the life I have before me right now. My life would be so different right now, if Josh hadn’t fled New York, and fled into my life for good.

He once asked me when I knew I loved him. It was on the evening of September 11th, as we lay in bed really late that night, after having eaten a crappy Domino’s pizza - the only delivery place in my suburb delivering that evening. The lights were out and we lay there, he in my arms. I don’t remember exactly what he said to me, but his voice was quiet and he told me about his day. I knew right then that I loved him, and that I’d always love him.

So today, I haven’t turned the television on (which, frankly, is less grand sounding than it ought to - we usually only watch the television in order to watch DVDs). I clicked on cnn.com but left. I haven’t focused on the losses on September 11th, because I am one of the lucky ones. I gained a family that day.

I’ll never, ever forget everything else that’s happened on that date, because I have a son, a son who wasn’t alive but needs to know what happened. One day when he’s older, he’ll learn in school about the events of September 11th and he’ll come home and sit on his father’s lap and ask him, “Where were you on September 11th, 2001?” and he’ll need to be ready to hear that story. And then I’ll take him onto my lap and tell him mine.