“There are kids fighting in Afghanistan right now, dying in Afghanistan right now, who were four years old on 9/11.” He held the petition out for me to sign. Someone, a man, taller than me, passed by on the sidewalk, his fingertips half an inch or less from my leg. “Can you imagine that? They probably don’t even remember watching the planes hit the towers. Weren’t even old enough to be in school then. How much do you remember from when you were four?” “Oh. I don’t know.” (Super Mario Bros., an artificial Christmas tree, a neighbor’s dog running into the woods and never coming back.)

I pretended to read the petition. I couldn’t actually read it. He was too close. He was overflowing, leaking onto the page, smudging the letters. Some of part of him had materialized on the paper, like condensation, or had fallen there, like spit.

“Gives you perspective, doesn’t it? They can’t even know what they’re supposed to be fighting for, not really. I mean, they’re sold all this patriotic bullshit, but they can’t know. Their mom probably made them leave the room that morning and sat them in front of SpongeBob while she was calling all her friends and uncles and cousins to make sure they weren’t in the city. And now they’re the ones fighting. It’s fucking crazy.” “Yeah, you’re right.” He had started swearing. At first I thought it was a pretense, some rehearsed folksiness, part of his pre-prepared spiel. But there was some authenticity in his tone, a little bit of mad universal empathy, a subtle choking in his voice—I thought about him suffocating, and for a moment, somewhere, in the back of my mind, it was my hands around his neck.

“Have you ever known anyone who had to fight over there?” Had I? There was a guy I knew in high school. He had dark hair. He knew the lyrics to every track on the Marshal Mathers LP by heart. He loved the word “skank.” He had an album on his facebook page titled “knifes.” He was never anything but nice to me. I hadn’t spoken to him for years. Maybe he had been killed. An IED, or whatever. I tried to make him real in my imagination, to see if I could make him human. I couldn’t. He was a list, an inventory of traits and memories. Maybe he had been blown to pieces. “Yes, probably. I think I have.”

“Don’t you think he wants to come home?” I realized then what I wanted to say to this man, to him, and to the bits of him stuck to this petition. I wanted to tell him that age had nothing to do with it, that what he or I or some four year old saw or didn’t on the TV a decade ago was irrelevant. 9/11 was a regional tragedy. It was one of those stories that would have been confined to the metro section, had it not been for New York City reporters who imagined themselves the center of the universe. It was a bad traffic day turned into a scandal turned into a media obsession. It might as well have been Chris Christie closing the George Washington Bridge.

I could remember the day. I had spent that morning watching ash clouds undulate on television, and then, around mid-afternoon, I went outside. It was a beautiful day. Flawless blue sky, 70 degrees, birds, dragonflies, etc. All that, and I didn’t even have to leave New York State. With all that was happening a few hours south—the firefighters trapped, the falling man—I couldn’t even taste smoke in the air. I tried. And that was his war too: a regional tragedy.

I signed the petition. He cornered me into a handshake. I thanked him as I walked away.